Show HN: Vowl daily word guessing game(vowlgame.com) |
Show HN: Vowl daily word guessing game(vowlgame.com) |
Today's 'transportation' puzzle had 4 consonants & 4 vowels. I got to a guess (nonsense string) whose feedback was 4 vowels correct, 4 consonants correct. (Not sharing here to avoid spoiling for others.)
After becoming frustrated that I couldn't devise a word using those letters, I entered them into online word-finders like those for Scrabble or the Internet Anagram Server – and they're not turning up any single 8-letter word/words (transportation related or not, compound or not) that might be the answer.
Maybe brands? No luck.
Show to wife, she makes suggestion that's similar to the 8 letters I've been trying, but differs in one vowel. Bingo.
So: it was telling me I had 4 vowels correct even when I was supplying a vowel NOT present in the answer.
(A rot13 of a string it erroneously told me had 4 vowels and 4 consonants correct: ZNEBHVYA)
I'd recommend adding the word "Clue:" in front of the clue. Perhaps consult with a true design professional too, I'm just shooting from the hip and giving feedback on my experience. I made 7 guesses before the clue, and I got the solution in 1 guess after seeing the clue.
I like the game in general though.
Would prefer to know which letters were correct even if there’s no info about position correctness.
I found the answer trivial to google for after I gave up trying to think of an “8 letter word for transportation” that had the vowels in the right place
Better feedback probably would have kept me from resorting to google
In this aspect Wordle got it right with the color cues, but here I don't think it's even possible to simplify the gameplay that way.
Transportation was really fun; I thought a long time and got it in 1, and I felt I had a grasp on what one part of the word was gonna be before I worked out the whole word.
I didn't enjoy the country or kings of leon puzzles; it's possible I would have if I'd played it differently.
But I couldn't really bring myself to make guesses I know aren't the answer. I think most of the daily word games have taught me that. So what I did was look up a list of countries and kings of leon songs, which is basically just looking up the answer.
I'll play again tomorrow to see how I feel once I play it differently, it seems more fun if I'm willing to guess CCAACAAC or whatever when I know it's something I'm never going to figure out in 1.
I tried gathering info on the beatles song, I'm never gonna figure it out except either by looking up a list or playing a mastermind information deduction game. It just felt like I was gonna have to go through most of the alphabet with BAB BABA, CEC CECE, DID DIDI etc type guesses until I know most or all of the letters to unscramble. Instead I called it quits on this one.
I'd work on the feedback giving more immediately actionable info, and perhaps work on narrowing the categories to things basically everyone knows.
Word: METER
Guess: KEXXX (two vowels correct)
Guess: KEXER (two vowels correct)
What they almost all have in common is being able to inch closer to your target. In this case, the best you can do is eventually deduce all the letters of the target, at which point you are left with an anagram. There will be no further clues that help you at all.
In its current form, this is not fun and I would not recommend it or play again.
In my opinion this actually makes more sense.
One small point of feedback. It wasn’t clear that you were expected to enter a space when the clue has multiple words and uses a slash `/`.
Maybe allow the `/` to be entered, too, and add a note that the user can just enter a space instead?
At that stage, I expected to have a result I could share with people. Just being taken to a step 2 was demoralising. And feels too long for a daily game.
the 3 letter challenge didn't really show off the game though
I just guessed 3 possible words and happened to be correct on my 3rd guess
It makes it quite hard. I'm not sure if it's a good hard or a bad hard yet.
There is a school of thought that says you should also be able to classify letters as they appear in specific words.† That's where the idea comes from that "Y is sometimes a vowel".
But people who believe that they hold to that school are generally unwilling to say that M is sometimes a vowel, despite the fact that the spelling of the second syllable in rhythm is "m". This is difficult to reconcile with the justification given for Y sometimes being a vowel, that any syllable must contain a vowel.
As far as the phonetics go, they support the idea that "m" /m/ in rhythm is not a vowel [it would be called a "syllabic consonant"] while "y" /i/ in homily is. Obviously, this requires tossing out the idea that all syllables must contain vowels. Phonetics assigns an intermediate status to the "y" /j/ in "yell" - it is a vowel as far as the mechanics of producing it go, but it clearly behaves as if it is a consonant, so it is called a "glide".
As far as the etymology goes, Y represents a foreign sound, a vowel in ancient Greek, and it's always a vowel. Interestingly enough, the ancient Greek vowel is sometimes a consonant (what you'd think of as V) in modern Greek.
† This doesn't really work; any particular word will have a definite spelling and a definite pronunciation, but that doesn't mean that it's possible to consistently map the letters of the spelling to the sounds of the pronunciation.
The only kind-of vowel sound in the second syllable of rhythm is what you get from saying "th", but actually it just sounds like 3 consonants together without a vowel.
People say that 'y' is sometimes a vowel because it sometimes sounds like one, not because it sometimes fits in a syllable.