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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Build your own Bracket City puzzle

Hi HN — Bracket City is the word puzzle game I made earlier this year and (in part thanks to this community, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622719) managed to license to the Atlantic in April. The game has been growing a lot and I wanted to share the latest: a tool that lets anyone make a Bracket City puzzle — specifically a “Bracket Suburb”! I made this tool to help me construct puzzles, and I’ve been using it every day for months. After the Atlantic launch, I started to get the occasional inquiry about whether there was a way to make your own puzzle. One guy…

Bracket City is a word puzzle game licensed to the Atlantic that challenges players to find connections between words arranged in brackets. The new "Build your own Bracket City" tool lets anyone create custom puzzles… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Hi hn - I co-own a diner where I co-host a puzzle night that is kind of like a diner-themed escape room. At the last one, I made a puzzle that was crossword-like clues nested in brackets. People at the diner seemed to like it, so I resolved to make it a real game and Bracket City was born: https://bracket.city. I love crosswords, so it's been fun to write crossword-like clues: [it contains MSG] as well as clues that would not make it into a crossword: [___ hard place] I write all the puzzles and post a new one at midnight ET every day of the week. Still working on a lot of…

    2025 · bracket.city · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    BERLINTOTO Merupakan Link Slot Gacor Online Resmi Mahjong Ways 2 Depo 5K Terbesar & Situs Toto Raja Slot Hoki Top 1 Di Asia yang menghadirkan akses permainan online dengan pilihan slot populer, sistem praktis, dan layanan yang mudah digunakan.

    2025 · whatsit.today · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation. I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So…

    2022 · hexapipes.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    I shared Word Slicer here a while back — it’s a free, ad-free, browser-based word game where you try to find 5 words in 5 minutes. Since then I’ve been improving it (daily challenge archive, cleaner UI, better stats), and I’d love more feedback from the HN crowd. In particular, I’m interested in thoughts on the gameplay flow, design/UX, and what would make it more engaging.

    2024 · wordslicer.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Create a city game generating upwards of $30k per year

    2022 · questoapp.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Create your own word search puzzle or play it online

    2022 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    2020 · victorribeiro.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8IM
  9. 9

    City making puzzle game.

    2015 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Build your own Bit City!

    2017 · play.google.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hi everybody. I occasionally make little browser-based games, and this is my latest attempt. It's not quite done, but it's quite playable (note: it does include audio): https://www.omiword.com/ This has been my occasional tinker target for ~5 years now, starting in the early days of Covid. The objective is to drag letter tiles within certain boundaries to spell four common American-English words. It hasn't got ads or anything, it's just supposed to be fun for its own sake. If people happen to like it, I might add an option for folks to make a small, one-time payment to unlock…

    2025 · omiword.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    DIY urban planning

    2016 · streetmix.net · its alternatives →

  13. 13IW

    I’ve been working on a puzzle game for a few years as a side project. The game is based on a small region of tiles in a grid that is mirrored, modified, and mirrored again. It’s based on a novel phenomenon I noticed where, once these mutations happen a few times, the original region can be hard to recognize. You have a feeling there are symmetries in the image, but they are just out of grasp. Going further, if only part of the region is visible, such as mirroring off the edge of the board, it adds to the feeling and it becomes a satisfying puzzle to solve. I originally published this on the…

    2024 · hidden-mirrors.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14AW

    I’ve long thought that the Word of the Day was a wasted genre. The goal should be to give you words you can use; to enrich your understanding of words you already know; or at least to use words to tell you something neat about the world. Instead, what you usually get is words that will never be used in conversation, held up as curios. Some examples from Dictionary.com’s daily email: thewless, balladmonger, vagility, contextomy. These words are... not useful. I’ve always thought I could do better. My friend Ben recently created a daily puzzle game, called Bracket City, launched here on HN…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Custom word puzzles for friends

    2022 · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Create or play thematic city quests around the globe

    2021 · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    An exciting, addictive and easy to play puzzle game.

    2017 · play.google.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    I've been working on this for a while as an experiment and I'm now pretty happy with it. I've always written code, but I've always been a frankly incompetent frontend developer, and I've never really been able to talk myself into making a game; it was just too much trouble, even though I had ideas I wanted to try! Claude Code made it possible for the first time. I hope you like it. I'm still working on it!

    2025 · playwordfall.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19IM

    Hi everyone, Wanted to share a game I built. It's called Unscramble! and I believe it's the simplest word building game. Rules: You get a few letters on screen. You need to make one word with all the letters. Tap a letter to select. Tap again to deselect. Faster you go, better you score. If you enter anagrams of the word it's looking for, it gives you extra points. If you are stuck, you can either "Ask Friend" or get Hint. You get extra points for getting the word fast but you don't get penalized for taking too long. I believe the simplicity of the game along with big touch buttons makes it…

    Sep 2026 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    I created a puzzle game after some recent years of hiatus from game development. It was a puzzle game where you have to assemble a randomized tiles. You can view the preview using eye icon on the top right side. You also can undo your previous step. I created this game using Unity because I am already familiar with it. If you encounter the tiles is not randomized, please try recreate the tile again, I don't exactly know why it's happenning. Thank you

    2024 · yunusefendi52.itch.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    A week ago I launched Tiled Words, my own unique spin on the daily word puzzle genre. Tiled Words merges tile-placing board game mechanics with crosswords. You rotate and rearrange tiles to find clues and rebuild a broken crossword. Every day there's a new themed puzzle for you to solve. The game is web based: the graphics are SVGs, animations are powered by CSS, and Vue/Nuxt are used to power templating, reactivity, and routing. Most of the complex logic lives in TypeScript modules. The whole thing is responsive. It's been a long time in the making. I started the first version in the…

    Oct 2025 · tiledwords.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Build your own Puzzle Library

    2020 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hey HN, My partner and I made a daily puzzle game called "bridj.link" (the dot is not silent). Thought I'd give Hello World in SolidJS a shot but ended up taking things a bit too far (to the point where we're now on our 99th puzzle!) Each puzzle has thousands of valid solutions. The tutorial goes into a bit more detail, but basically, each puzzle consists of a top word and a bottom word. These words need to be linked together using real words, made up of the tiles provided. In addition to an emoji summary of your solution, you'll get a fancy link that you can share with others upon…

    2024 · bridj.link · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Build your own Bit City!

    2017 · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →