nowfound

Dev tools · February 8, 2022

TM

Three Magic Words

Here’s a free, fun, novel five-letter word game for the web! It’s a game I originally wrote for the iPhone in 2010, but wasn’t able to finish before my first child was born. When I left my senior web developer job in September 2021 I figured I would postpone looking for work and finish the game before another 11 years passed, and expose myself to new skills doing it (in this case, Swift). I released it on the App Store in December, then turned my attention to doing a web version — when suddenly Wordle was in The NY Times, and then everywhere. Perhaps foolishly, I plowed ahead and here we…

What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

Here’s a free, fun, novel five-letter word game for the web! It’s a game I originally wrote for the iPhone in 2010, but wasn’t able to finish before my first child was born. When I left my senior web developer job in September 2021 I figured I would postpone looking for work and finish the game before another 11 years passed, and expose myself to new skills doing it (in this case, Swift). I released it on the App Store in December, then turned my attention to doing a web version — when suddenly Wordle was in The NY Times, and then everywhere. Perhaps foolishly, I plowed ahead and here we are. Like Wordle and some other NY Times word games, there is a single daily puzzle, but like traditional crossword puzzles, it gets harder throughout the week.

Does the same job

all alternatives →
  • OA
    Omiword – A daily, sector-based word puzzle2025 · omiword.com · ▲56

    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…

  • MN
    My new daily word game, LETTERS2025 · thelettersgame.com · ▲5

    I made a new daily word game for web and iOS which is a funky mix of scrabble and boggle. Each day everyone gets the same randomly generated configuration of bonus tiles and letters on a grid. The app is written completely in SwiftUI and the web port is written in ts/react. Both use the same random seeds each day.

  • Letterfall2022 · ▲95

    A free word game for iOS

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  • FB
    Flappy Bird and Wordle2023 · flappybirdle.com · ▲232

    Hey HN! FlappyBirdle combines elements from the game Flappy Bird and the popular word game Wordle. I wanted to see if I could make a game that added urgency to Wordle, while also feeling outragous at the same time. I think I achieved it with FlappyBirdle. Every time you type a letter of the word, the bird flaps its wings and you get closer to the goal. It also has an easy mode that ignores the pipes, so even beginners can get a good score. Let me know if you have any ideas on how I can make it better!

  • SW
    Snack Words - Real-time, Multi-player Word Game for iOS2011 · ▲16

    I just finished my first iOS game, Snack Words, which is a real-time, multi-player word finding game. iTunes link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snack-words/id425786167?mt=8&ls=1 YouTube video demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zPQuqoUHqU I wanted to build something very simple and minimal. There's no figuring out who to play, and each game is only 90 seconds long. The backend is 2,400 lines (so short!) of Erlang which speaks a custom protocol (length tagged JSON packets) to the client. The Objective-C side protocol implementation makes heavy use of blocks and works a lot like my…

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