Wordle and NYT Connections are two games I've enjoyed playing daily for several years. I like how they're relaxing, simple, I can come back to them throughout the day, and they're so accessible that friends and family frequently play too and we share results. I wanted to create something in a similar vein that I'd enjoy playing daily alongside them.

Chiddle is what I came up with. It's essentially boggle, but with scrabble-style letter points, and the aim is to get the highest score you can with your five highest scoring found words. You can try to find as many words as you like but only the top five scoring are counted towards your score, which is shown primarily as a percentage of the highest possible score. When you can't find any more you can submit your score to reveal the remaining top words and share your result. Like Wordle there is a new puzzle each day.

It's written in HTML/pure JS/CSS, with puzzles generated by a .net console app. Hosted for free on cloudflare.

All words have definitions, so if you try a word but are not sure what it means, you can read the definition afterwards if it's valid. When the top words are revealed, their definitions are also laid out alongside them. I found this to be a nice way of learning some new words. I also added a hint button to aid with finding the last word(s) to get you to a 100% score (all it gives you is what letter the word starts with). I go back and forth on whether the hint system affects the challenge too much, but I often don't get to 100% even with hints; some words are just really tricky to spot!

The biggest challenge of the project is in trying to generate puzzles that are satisfying to complete. After some early testing I found the criteria that makes the best puzzles are: 1. Lots of possible words. 2. Top words that are relatively common. 3. Tops words that are not mostly similar.

For point 1 I reject generated puzzles that contain a word count below a threshold. For point 2 I collected a number of common word lists from different sources, and I use the number of lists a word appears on to determine how common it probably is. If it's possible to get a 100% with common words, then the puzzle goes to a manual review stage where I check that the words are in fact common, and that point 3 is satisfied.

I've been playing around with the game for quite a while and I'm running out of ideas on how to improve it. Any feedback or suggestions are welcome!