Show HN: Whittle – A shrinking word game

Nice! You definitely have something there.

I would love a dictionary lookup. I'd expect a big part of the strategy to be working backwards from the possible 1/2 letter words, but there's no way to tell how reasonable the dictionary is without testing, and getting the game into the proper state to test would be just as hard as solving the puzzle in the first place.

Having two separate goals (eliminate all letters, find all the words) seems confusing. Honestly I find the latter to be a fairly tedious prospect, but the game really seems to push you toward it especially with the colors on the calendar depending on the % of words found. "Damn it, I got a perfect score with no undos, and all I have to show for it is a red square showing how bad a job I did!"

The UI (on a desktop) felt kind of broken at the start because nothing has hover effects. Anything clickable would benefit from some kind of an effect, but especially the letters on the words. If you don't want color changes or animations, at least set the cursor style.

babel16 · 5 months ago

Thank you so much for the feedback! The dictionary look up feature is a great idea-- I had never thought of it before, but it does solve a pain point with the game you've articulated well.

The desktop UI suggestions are also very helpful. I've updated the desktop version with some minor hover effects and cursor styling. I've mostly been focused on mobile, so it was good hear some feedback for desktop.

A solver in SWI Prolog: https://swish.swi-prolog.org/p/PlayWhittle_Solver.pl which you can run by querying in the lower right window:

    solve("brats herbs", Steps).

and seeing:

    Steps = ['rats herbs', 'rat herbs', 'rat hers', 'rat her', rather, rater, rate, ate, at, a, ''] ;

The core is this grammar:

    whittle(S0) --> [S1],                  % state S1 comes from
                    { select(_, S0, S1),   % removing a char from S0,
                      phrase(valid_state(_), S1) }, % S1 must be all words,
                      whittle(S1).         % and recurse.
    whittle([]) --> [].

which describes a solution as a list of successful state changes from input to empty string. Each change removes one character from the string and must leave a valid state after doing that. Prolog's implicit backtracking search means that when it tries "cat","at","t" the valid_state check fails because "t" is not in the wordlist, it backtracks to the previous state "cat","at" and retries, getting to "cat,"at","a","" and success.

So it's doing a depth-first search of the tree of all possible game states that come from removing each letter from each substring, only exploring each branch as deep as the first failure. It stops at the first success, but spacebar or 'next' will search for another solution. Find all 136 solutions by querying: findall(Steps, solve("brats herbs", Steps), Solutions).

It won't work in Scryer, it would need select/3 and the DCG helpers ported/included in the code, then changes to run on strings instead of character code lists. It would likely be more memory efficient then.

jsnell · 5 months ago

duncancarroll · 5 months ago

Fun! I was a bit confused at the end because there's no "victory" state or indication. I think I was expecting it to give me a new word pair once I got to the end, or tell me "come back tomorrow for another round"

Hammershaft · 5 months ago

You can always get it down to zero letters! The game should remind you how many letters you have left before you can win to make it clear .

teach · 5 months ago

I didn't understand what you were saying at first, but it turns out that you have to click to remove the final, single letter before the "you won" screen shows.

And I agree it would be nice if the game could detect when you've reached a dead end and notify you somehow.

Trufa · 5 months ago

I think I've tried every combination herbs possible, you have to whittle to her and the to he, and then there's nothing, what do you mean?

frankdenbow · 5 months ago

Came here to say it needs a victory state or a score to know if I got to the best possible solution.

onion92 · 5 months ago

WOW, we had a similar idea: https://www.shrinkle.org

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44714167

Great work!

Wow, great minds think alike! Your game is really fun and clever as well, thank you for sharing :)

pragmatick · 5 months ago

FWIW I like yours better. I'd just love to play the ones from previous days.

Thank you! You are actually able to play ones from previous days, through the archive (calendar button on the main page).

unnamed76ri · 5 months ago

There should be an “I give up” button to let you finish the game and be locked into that result for the day. I like the idea, there’s just something about the UX that’s weird to me.

jangerhofer · 5 months ago

For those who are initially as dense as I am: spaces are also 'whittleable' characters!

busymom0 · 5 months ago

When I remove "h" from:

rat he

It doesn't accept "rate" as a correct word. What am I doing wrong?

Retr0id · 5 months ago

Spaces are also whittleable characters. "rat e" is two words, the latter of which is not valid.

Freeboots · 5 months ago

The space counts and has to be removed. Rathe is not a word, nor is e, so youve got to find another way.

Deleted Comment

jodrellblank · 5 months ago

c22 · 5 months ago

This is cool, it's kind of the inverse of a game I used to play with my mother: One player says a letter and thinks of a word that starts with that letter, the next player adds a letter (while thinking of a valid word that that could be created with the new prefix). Play continues in this fashion until someone is forced to spell an actual word, then they lose and you can start a new round.

joeframbach · 5 months ago

Ghostwriter. https://youtu.be/sGByxW2R3hQ?t=1080

pimlottc · 5 months ago

Feedback: I wasn’t sure what to do in the initial game state. It wasn’t obvious that the letters could be “clicked” directly. In a similar word game [0] (also posted on HN recently; perhaps your inspiration?), the letters are in boxes that make them seem more like buttons you can press. The unlabeled tabs at the bottom were also mysterious; many other games like Wordle have their inputs (e.g. a keyboard) at the bottom, so that was initially a bit confusing.

It’s also easy to accidentally spoil the game by clicking the unlabeled right tab. EDIT: Oops, didn't realize that was the words discovered list, not the complete wordlist. This should have a label to make it clearer.

Also, in the help screen, the dots in the UI made me expect to swipe (on mobile) to navigate between screens, so that was a bit confusing at first.

0: https://www.shrinkle.org/

Hi, thanks for the feedback! Swiping on the tutorial is a great polish idea, I just added it to the game.

redbell · 5 months ago

Yes, a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44714167