Alternatives
Products that do what What happens if you make a crossword out of Reddit r/gaming does
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,…
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Hi HN! Looking for feedback on this 1v1 and daily word dueling game I've built over the last few months. Play here: https://wordtrak.com/ Or on iOS here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wordtrak/id6760442363 (Android version soon!)
May 2026 · wordtrak.com
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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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Hello HN, I created Crossle after playing a dice version of this once. it's web/mobile only with mechanics similar to wordle. the object is to create a crossword using scrabble words that is fully connected and each word is at least 3 characters long. all letters must be used. Fun weekend coding project that I'd love to get any feedback on. thanks!
Mar 2026 · playcrossle.com
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Forkle (forkle.co.uk) is a daily word game where two thematically linked crosswords occupy the same grid simultaneously. Every tile contains two letters - one belonging to each puzzle - displayed as a diagonal colour split. Where the two puzzles intersect, some tiles share the same letter, giving you a foothold into both crosswords at once. The mechanic has two layers: the shared grid, and the connected themes. Each day's two crosswords are thematically paired around a central idea. For example, a previous puzzle was "Same House, Different Kingdoms" - same home, same humans, entirely…
Apr 2026 · forkle.co.uk
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Hello HN, Introducing VocabGenii.com, my online vocabulary game. It is the first product from my company, Genii, Inc., that brings innovative, engaging new learning experience to the market by leveraging web 2.0 and social networks. Currently, we are running a 10K Challenge -- anyone scoring 10,000 points before the contest ends (March 24 04:00 GMT) will get 3-Month unlimited play. Exceptional performance would also be recognized in our 10K Hall of Fame with limited edition trophies! We're hiring! If you have disruptive ideas on language learning and online education, and possess…
2011
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2025 · spaceword.org
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Hi Hacker News! My friend and I [1] would like to share with you something we did this week-end. We really like the idea of game jams like the Ludum Dare, and we’d like to participate, but it’s often complicated for us, as we are often limited by the rules inherent to this kind of competition: we have to be available at specific dates, and the rules doesn’t always work for us. For example: if you want to participate as a team in a Ludum Dare compo, you have 72h instead of 48h, and you are not required to publish your code. We realized that what we really like is: - To work together. - The…
2014
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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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http://codewords.io/ I've been trying to get permission to run a game of it from the publisher and designer (CGE & Vlaada Chvátil) but I haven't heard back. I've found demonstrating that there's interest in what you're doing is the best way to get ahold of people. So.. Anyone interested in trying a massive game of Codenames over Twitch? Not quite "For Science!" more "For Engineering!" Which, let's be honest here, has a much better ring to it. If you'd like to know more, I put up an FAQ up here: http://codewords.io/faq/ If you'd like to sign up to help,…
2017
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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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https://github.com/PlumeCat/tack Hi HN! Tack is a scripting language I've been working on sporadically for the past year or so, and intensely for the past few weeks. It originated out of a desire for something that was like Lua, but with a more familiar syntax, and without some of the other surprises in Lua such as the 1-indexed tables. It's also been a great learning project, and a very satisfying challenge! While the current version is early beta at best, I hope to continue working on it and maybe see some adoption. Despite the relative lack of optimization, I'm very…
2023 · github.com
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I love word association games. Here's a playable wordplay game where you match opposite word tiles. After playtesting a lot of mechanics, I think opposites play really nicely with Mahjong solitaire. The current generation of frontier LLMs can't make puzzles that get much more interesting than hot-vs-big-vs-fast. New inferences keep circling a small pool of concepts unless the prompting has a way to get the LLM into new territories of language. Puzzlemaking needs graph traversals. I made 20 levels algorithmically because I work with a huge semantic graph with over 100M edges, built from…
Mar 2026 · linguabase.org
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I started an experimental series, "console.solve", on mini javascript challenges a few months back and received good feedbacks on it. So I created a [second one](https://colintoh.com/console-solve/issue-2?utm_source=colint...) this month. Not sure anyone here will be interested as it's not exactly pro-level stuff. But if you have an hour to spare, it can be a good distraction. For those who are interested, here was the [first challenge](https://colintoh.com/console-solve/issue-1?utm_source=colint...).
2017
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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!
Jun 2026 · motplot.app
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Hi hn, Its been a while since my kid has been dreaming to make videogames, as you know, the entry bar is high, too many technical details are involved. A few months ago, we started making games, we have tried many different ways, from dragging blocks to write code with a high-level library to make it simple, it is still too much work. Getting into the AI boat, I decided to give it a try for making games, turns out that it works super nicely, still, you still have many technical concepts involved, what language should the game be written in? where do you store the file/assets? how do you…
2024 · playcodeai.com
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I built this daily puzzle game called "Omitten". The idea came from a compulsive habit I got from reading books on an e-reader and constantly looking up definitions (iykyk). Quite often you'd see a single word with 20 different meanings in different contexts, and I wanted to build a game around that. In the game you get a maximum of 4 clues. The first one will generally be an archaic form or an unusual context. The second and third pivot into entirely different domains to try and trick your brain, and by the fourth, it should be fairly obvious. You start with only the first clue, and as you…
May 2026 · omitten.com
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Hey there HN, I took a page from Wordle's mechanisms and made this game for fun for some friends and I. Check out Wheredle and let me know what you think of it! ↙ ↗ ↘ https://wheredle.xyz
2022 · wheredle.xyz
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The idea is to get from a starting word to a target word by creating a list of words to go in the middle. You can only change one letter at a time. Yesterday's words: https://twitter.com/ChangelistGame/status/1518695582151237632 Today's game: https://changelist.rocks/
2022
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