Alternatives
Products that do what Motplot is a crossword but it plays like Sudoku does
Motplot and has the vibe of Sudoku if you played it with words instead of numbers. I made it so I would stop losing at bananagrams to my 99 year old grandma, but she beats me at this too. It's free, there's a new puzzle daily, hope you like it!
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Hey there! I'm the brains behind the math crossword game on my site. This game is all about making math a little more fun – users just drag and drop numbers to fill in the blanks and move on to the next level if they get it right. Let me know if face any issues or have any suggestions! :)
2024 · scientific.place
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This is a game I wrote over the last month and a bit. The effort allocation was pretty different from what I've done in the past. The game design snapped together very quickly: I had the initial idea, played a couple of games on a spreadsheet to get a feel for the idea, and made one change based on those plays. After that everything felt just right through multiple rounds of playtesting. Likewise the puzzle generation is nowhere near as elaborate as in my previous game, fairly simple methods worked well and provided good variety. Instead I ended up spending silly amounts of time on curating…
2024 · huewords.snellman.net
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As a fan of dense New York Times-style crosswords, I challenged myself to create topic-specific puzzles. It turns out that generating crosswords and efficiently placing words is a non-trivial computational problem. I started the project, "Joystick Jargon" combining traditional crossword elements with gaming-related vocabulary. Here's the technical process behind it: 1. Data Source: Used a 3.8 Million Rows Reddit dataset from Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/datasets/webis/tldr-17). 2. Data Filtering: Narrowed down to gaming-related subreddits (r/gaming,…
2024
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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
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2022 · crosswordle.vercel.app
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Hello! Try out a 3x3 puzzle and click the question mark in the top right for a tutorial. I'd really appreciate any feedback! Thanks
2024 · slidecross.io
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Hello HN, I've created a new Sudoku app for iOS and Android that prioritizes simplicity and privacy. It's free to download and use, and I'd be grateful for any feedback or suggestions. Features: > 4 difficulty levels, accessible at any time > No personal data collection of any kind > Clean, minimalistic design that focuses on the game > Takes up significantly less space than other popular apps (by a factor of about 10x) > Minimal use of advertisements I was frustrated by how many of the popular Sudoku apps feel excessively over-engineered, consume a lot of storage space and some that even…
2023
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I posted a version of this over a year ago but decided to rebuild it recently. Bored Spreadsheet is a collection of quick and easy games that look like a spreadsheet from a distance. I have tightened the app to be a collection of 6 games: Minesweeper, 2048, solitaire, sudoku, a market trading game and a daily reconciliation puzzle where the player must find bad data in a fake table. The games are free to play but sign up is required to submit your scores to the leaderboard. As was the original intention over a year ago, I hope this proves useful to those office workers who have a lot of…
Jun 2026 · boredspreadsheet.com
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Hi HN! In the last couple of weeks I've been working on Cranki: Cranki = Crosswords + Anki. (It's a stupid name tbh, haha) I like doing crosswords in Spanish (to learn vocab) but none of the apps out there allowed me to use my own list of words that I come across. So I built one instead. It's entirely client-side. No server, no database, no accounts, etc. Your words and stats are stored in local storage. I built this for myself but let me know if you like it!
Apr 2026 · cranki.app
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This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a long time, and I decided to finally code it up. In the same way that Scrabble decomposes words into letters, what if there was a game that decomposed letters into sub-shapes? There’s a lot of directions this could go, and I’m still exploring the possibility space. Enjoy. Suggestions welcome. It doesn’t have a real name yet.
2024 · shovemedia.com
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2022 · apps.apple.com
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I've been playing with this for quite some time and I think it's finally ready for public consumption. All feedback welcome.
2025 · madmonk13.github.io
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I built a procedurally generated word-search game where the puzzle never ends - as you scroll, the grid expands infinitely and new words appear. It’s designed to be quick to pick up, satisfying to play, and a little addictive. The core game works without an account using the pre-defined games, but signing up allows you to generate games using any topic you can think of. I’d love feedback on gameplay, performance, and whether the endless format feels engaging over time. If you try it, I’d really appreciate any bug reports or suggestions. Thanks in advance!
Dec 2025 · endless-wordsearch.com
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If you're currently caffeinated you may or may not want to hop on to this zap-or-confetti mental math operant conditioning chamber Sorry for the low effort app slop but this is what you get haha Certified sound free because that sort of dopamine is just distracting
2025 · arithmetic-skinnerbox.lovable.app
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It's like a mix between Picross (Nonograms) and Polyominoes. It's a minimalist puzzler which has no text, no tutorials (none required) and no ads set in a relaxing environment. App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/shapeuku-shape-puzzle-game/i... Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dtbgames.s... I have a bulk load of Android promo codes to give away, so if you'd like one let me know! (Sorry iOS users, I have no free codes left!)
2018
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My partner and I built a daily word game that has elements of the Mini Crossword, Wordle, and Spelling Bee, with some twists all its own. I’ve been fairly obsessed with the New York Times crossword puzzle ever since I saw the documentary Wordplay about 12 years ago. I started with Mondays and gradually made my way up to Saturdays, and when I began to appreciate the puzzles as aesthetic objects worthy of appreciation and criticism (rather than just a slog to survive and then brag about), I began to wonder what it would be like to create puzzles. But making full crossword puzzles was always…
2025 · triplit.com
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Hey everyone, I'm Fabio, a very long time lurker here. Today I want to celebrate and share with you, again, a game that I conceived more than 8 years ago. I shared it last week with all its history (if you're curious) [1], but it just stayed in the "shownew" and never reached the main "show" page, hopefully this time it'll do better (:crossed_fingers:)! What changed since last week? Today I've also published the mobile apps for both iOS and Android (last week it was just web), which are also my first mobile apps ever. So I believe it's still a worthwhile post and something to show :) I'd…
2024 · fiftygame.com
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Hi everyone! First time posting. I built this mini memory game in an attempt to beat lazy memory syndrome. because when was the last time you remembered what you did the day before purely based on memory (or without being prompted) ? Super simple fun game for giving our brains a quick workout and actually reminding it on how to remember. If you had those old Nokia phones from the early 90s, the game will seem insanely familiar to you
Sep 2025 · shraddhabuiltitwithai.com
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Hi everyone. I spent the last year making Puzzle Express. Play and discover puzzles as if you were scrolling reels: play if you want or swipe up to skip. Made this as a healthier alternative to doomscrolling and a great, new way to discover puzzles you might love. If you don't fancy endless scrolling, try to finish the daily missions or play your favorite puzzle in the arcade.
Jun 2026 · puzzle.express
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Well HN, I've finally produced something I think is worthy of sharing, but I didn't do it "in a weekend". Yeah, it's an iOS puzzle game. And yeah, it's a game I built because I wanted to play it rather than based on market research, so all this sort of makes it the antithesis of a popular HN post. But whatever. Still hoping for some of that patented (har har) expert HN feedback. Critique any part of it except the music. Also, PM me for upgrade codes, or I can post some here if there's any interest. Download (it's free):…
2012
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