Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic

Congrats! My only feedback is that it's irritating to be counted "wrong" for naming a correct answer whose clue hasn't been simplified completely yet.

I agree. Thankfully that happened to me in the tutorial, so I went into the real game understanding that.

Yeah, this one is tough. I tried doing today's puzzle and I immediately knew the full solution, so I guess the designer's dilemma is whether or not to allow Wheel of Fortune-style "I would like to give the full answer", and if so how to score it. Did you do as much "work" as somebody who solved all the puzzles? I would argue not, so it should probably be scored less, but how much?

I see that as the core point of the game! Would it be a whole lot of fun to complete the game in one guess?

On the other hand I like when I can ‘skip ahead’ and then try to reverse engineer a trickier inside clue.

I completely agree with this.

Edit: And congratulations!

The instructions say one can solve any clue, and I could take that to mean any bracketed phrase. If they say "highlighted clue" it may help.

> Would it be a whole lot of fun to complete the game in one guess?

I would say yes. It would feel great, like you are outsmarting the game. Kind of like when you discover a good build in an RPG that helps you get ahead - even though it's often intended by the designer, you feel like you pulled a fast one on the game and it feels awesome.

I would add that the answer detection logic should probably get beefed up a bit as well. When I solved today's puzzle, it counted "race car" as a wrong answer when it expected "racecar". It should accept both forms of a compound word (also "racecar" isn't a word but that's more minor).

I had the same thought, but agree with others that it's the core part of the game.

I've played about a dozen of these now, and very often I can see what one of the big outer clues is way before I've worked out the inner clues.

If I just solve the big outer clue, the game is done in 20 seconds or so, and I'm not sure I'd keep coming back.

Rather, the challenge is to use what I've understood to work out the inner clues. This is tricky because I've got to keep more in my head at the same time, Towers of Hanoi-style. Or I sometimes write it out.

I have my notes in an open notepad from yesterday, so I can reproduce my thinking without spoiling today's:

[scold, with "at"]: hmmm, no idea.

[something golfers' apparently [scold, with "at"]]: not sure...

["there[something golfers' apparently [scold, with "at"]]]: Ah, ok, got it: [there[X]] has to be "therefore." So I see [something golfers' apparently [X]] is going to be "fore."

So if "fore" = "Something golfers apparently [X]" and X is [scold, with "at"], I can see that innermost one must be "yell."

i think they're saying it shouldn't be counted as a fail, rather than it should be accepted as an answer at that point.

if not i agree with you. it'd be nice if it flashed green or something around the entire set of brackets but made you still answer all the sub-clues though.

If you look at it instead like a 1D version of a crossword puzzle, then it's not skipping to the end so much as just filling out one of the other words.

I see it as a UI limitation that you can't fill it in (how would you show it?). But it's fine as is, I'll just use it to help me solve the adjacent ones.

100% this. I appreciate the puzzle of each individual clue, but I feel like it should be a valid answer if I guess a correct "outer" clue even if I haven't gotten all of its relevant inner answers.

Except the games isn't linear. The goal is to answer all of the clues without getting any wrong. Answering one clue doesn't do that.

But "race car" with a space isn't a palindrome.

It wouldn't be accepted by a palindrome-detecting function but it would generally be accepted by puzzle-solving conventions (e.g. for crosswords), which normally ignore spaces.

There's an ambiguity here between palindromic words and palindromic sentences (where punctuation and spacing are non-breaking):

"Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog"

or

"A man, a plan, a canal, Panama"

though it seems that all of the answers (in the one tutorial and one round that I played) are single words, often slid in as character insertions. Just go light on the spacebar, apparently.

Eat it and make the user think it's a failure, but don't count it negatively towards the score.

"If you answer early, we'll ignore your guess without letting you on."

Or maybe it could give some kind of extra credit for guessing a clue early. Or it could accept it, but still make you guess the interior clues, but when you get to the one, you already guessed, it shows it as already solved.

It seems that every answer is a single word. I don't think it says that anywhere, but the few I've done seem to be that way.

There is no space bar on the on-screen keyboard on mobile, so it's not possible to type multiple words as well.

yeah, it would be really nice if it turned the brackets around the word you guessed green and then filled it in automatically once the subclues were solved

Isn't the goal to get the final answer? I think it should be allowed. Similar to not using all the available attempts at wordle or finding a secret passage to the end in a videogame.

You wouldn't happen to be a fan of Jon Agee ?

Yeah, tried it for the first time and that limitation was enough that I don't expect to play it again. I mean, it's a choice the game designer has a right to make, but it makes it much less interesting for me if I can't try to work through and skip answers.

Yep. Wrong for forgetting to spell in American English, wrong for plural vs singular and wrong for guessing the right word too early are annoying.