Show HN: I hand-write 5 daily word puzzles before work
1 points
1 hour ago
| 1 comment
| dailyworder.com
| HN
I build and hand-write five daily word puzzles at dailyworder.com. Every clue and answer for the dailies are mine — I use AI for the code and it's unlocked crazy speed on small but thorny problems.

One technical detail as an example: Pyramid's editor (one of the five games) uses a ~350KB precomputed dataset of valid frameworks — grids where a single vowel, dropped into every slot, produces valid English words across all rows. Building the dataset was the actual work (combinatorial search over a 60k-word dictionary with constraint checks) but I did that in one session. Runtime is trivial: pick a framework, pick a vowel, render. Works offline. Don't think I could spend the time on it before LLMs.

The other four:

- Fourbe — Connections-style, but the connections are spelled out in crossword-style clues across four rounds

- Spying Bee — Word find flipped on it's head where players must reveal letters before they can select

- Invertle — word guesser with higher/lower hints

- Totum — letter-tile spelling game with a 16-letter pool

Built solo, evenings and weekends. Vite + React + TypeScript, Supabase, Vercel. iOS app is a Capacitor wrapper. Daily puzzles are free.

Genuinely curious what HN thinks. What's confusing about the games? What would you build differently?

ekorbia
12 minutes ago
[-]
I'm a big fan of word games and I gave this a quick try. At a glance some of the games are a bit confusing and could use a pop-up explaining game play for first time users.

What are you storing in Supabase? I've also AI coded a couple of small word games but I explicitly stayed away from any back-end requirements so I could deploy easily to CloudFlare pages.

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