Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
175 comments
·April 8, 2025brgross
NobodyNada
That's awesome, congrats! I had a lot of fun solving today's puzzle.
One minor bit of feedback/request: maybe I'm too spoiled by code editors, but it would be nice to have a visual aid for identifying matching brackets -- maybe colorizing matching pairs ("rainbow brackets"), and/or a click-to-highlight feature that highlights the entire contents of a pair of braces for you. I felt like I was spending a lot of time trying to count bracket pairs, which made it hard to keep track of where I was in the puzzle and was less interesting than trying to solve the wordplay.
Eric_WVGG
If the game never has more than three nested levels, you could use [square], then {curly}, then <angle> brakest. You could even do a fourth level with (parenthetical) brackets, but that would mean you couldn't use parenthesis in clues.
esperent
I think colors, or even shades of grey for accessibility, would be better for non-coders. Maybe even just put the current bracket in bold.
m0d0nne11
Nice work - congratulations! ...and, yes - I had to paste the text of today's game into vi so I could use the bracket matching to untangle the clues... :)
Also, I would make it more obvious which clues are eligible for solving at the moment rather than penalizing us for not being able to discern which ones are.
linsomniac
Agreed about the matching brackets, I had sent that suggestion to mayor@ a couple weeks ago, so maybe once this craziness settles down...
smw
Yes! Please!
echelon
Seconded. This would be super useful.
Amazing game!
InitialLastName
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.
bigstrat2003
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).
computerfriend
But "race car" with a space isn't a palindrome.
tallytarik
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.
unethical_ban
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.
bigstrat2003
> 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.
iamjackg
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?
SamBam
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."
4rt
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.
tallanvor
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.
kkukshtel
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.
thebruce87m
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.
jermaustin1
I agree. Thankfully that happened to me in the tutorial, so I went into the real game understanding that.
comex
Some feedback: On mobile, why is there a custom keyboard? I found it pretty annoying. I kept getting missed taps, and at least one wrong guess due to a typo I didn’t catch before. It doesn’t seem like the system keyboard’s spellchecking would interfere with the puzzle, so why not just use it? Is it an issue with layout consistency?
Otherwise I quite liked the puzzle.
kkukshtel
I also find the keyboard so terrible!
BoiledCabbage
Not having a 'space' button was helpful for me in getting going without the tutorial.
kfajdsl
Same feedback from me, puzzle was great but the custom keyboard is really hard to use, seems to misplace clicks a lot and it has no haptic feedback
ericmcer
Yeh use native inputs unless you absolutely need a custom one.
jonwinstanley
These kind of games rely on custom keyboards. Using the native control would be a lot more difficult.
darrenf
C["have you tried turning it off and __ again?"]grats! [stinger]n p[bet against an outcome]ing it daily and really en[ode to ___]ing it.
io84
n[frozen water]!
JoshTriplett
Were the terms confidential? If not, would you be willing to share what kinds of terms a deal like this has?
(If you have any doubt whatsoever about whether the terms are confidential, assume they are, and don't put anything at risk.)
martyvis
Josh Wardle sold Wordle to the New York Times for at least a million. https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911274/wordle-new-york-...
serial_dev
Wordle was extremely popular even before NYT bought it. I doubt the terms would be similar
aequitas
Congrats. I missed the HN post, but I found your game through https://lemmy.zip/c/dailygames.
Glad to hear you will still be making the puzzles yourselves.
There is one point of feedback and it's that I would like to have a native keyboard on iOS instead of a virtual one. For the rest this game is great.
felideon
Congrats! Some feedback, if you're taking any:
- Without the tutorial, it's confusing that you're not supposed to click and you're supposed to start typing. I wonder if placing the text box at the top would make that more clear.
- Some of the clues are confusing due to inconsistent punctuation. For example:
[to ___fish, to lure someone in using a fake internet persona] = cat
[do this or cut bait] = fish
[taking a pay one is a bummer] = cut
[rocks when added to soda will NOT cause your stomach to explode] = pop
thaumasiotes
> Some of the clues are confusing due to inconsistent punctuation.
> The first line uses a comma, the second line uses "or", the third and fourth lines don't have any punctuation at all, so the sentences make no sense.
... There is no inconsistency there. The 'or' and the comma in lines 1 and 2 are not parallel to each other; they're doing different things. Neither could be replaced by the other without changing the meaning of the clue.
Similarly, in line three, nothing in it could be replaced by a comma or by a disjunction. (But, and I want to emphasize this, line 2 doesn't even contain a disjunction; you appear to have misunderstood all of the clues.)
Line four is a bit different in that it contains a grammatical mistake. It should say [rocks that when added to soda will NOT cause your stomach to explode]. Other than that... it's a fourth style of clue. It isn't comparable to the other three, and there's still no inconsistency.
What do you imagine would add "consistency" to these clues? #s 1, 2, and 4 could be unified like so:
[to ____fish, to lure someone in using a fake internet persona]
[____ or cut bait, common idiom]
[____ rocks, rocks that when added to soda will NOT cause your stomach to explode]
felideon
Good points. I think clue 3 is weird because what is a "pay one"? You can't take a "pay one", but I get how to read it now---it's like an anaphor for the word. But yes, for consistency a blank space would have worked: [taking a pay ____ is a bummer]
I think my confusion with clue 2 was that I had never heard of the idiom "[to] fish or cut bait" [1]
roughly
Congrats! Great game - I did todays, and then immediately did them for the last week - it's really fun, tricky, and gives that nice little dopamine hit when you untangle the answer.
Contra several other people here, I also like that you _can't_ skip ahead - yes, I know that's probably "Venus", which is a good clue for working back up to the clues I _can't_ figure out. It's the journey, not the destination.
Chinjut
Re: many comments: The puzzle (as I think of it) is NOT to get the top-level answer. The puzzle is to get all the answers. If you figure out an outer answer earlier, that acts as a clue for an inner answer, just as inner answers act as clues for outer answers. A crossword isn't speedrun by just filling in the bottom-rightmost word.
Laremere
I've been playing and enjoying this game since it was first posted on hn. Doing this is absolutely key to getting a good score. Eg, for the final answer in today's puzzle, I had the outer answer, and had to work backward 3-4 layers. The other good thing to do is, if you have an answer to work forward a couple layers. Once you know that an answer makes the next couple questions make sense, you're much less likely to give an incorrect guess.
supportengineer
Next you'll say I can't speed run 2048 by shoving everything down and to the right.
delgaudm
This is the right answer. The fact that you might know an outer clue helps you when the inner clue is a stumper!
crazygringo
Really fun and clever! Super super creative. Congratulations!! I just love it when somebody comes up with a new idea like this, it's inspiring.
My only nitpick: I totally get that you have to solve the inner clues before solving an outer clue, and that outer clues can help you solve an inner clue.
BUT, the ergonomics/UX of that is just impossible... There was an inner clue that was super-stumping me, and I could solve "downwards" from like 5 clues above, but trying to keep track of which brackets were which and which level was which was maddening.
It really feels like it needs a way to answer outer clues even if it won't collapse them. Just to keep track of them. And then a better way of tracking so many levels of nesting. I don't know if the answer is indented nesting like in code, or what. But the current UX only effectively allows you to work inside-out, when outside-in is clearly a necessary piece of the puzzle, because sometimes you get inner clues that are just stumpers that you have no other way of figuring out.
ajjenkins
Can you color code the brackets so it’s easy to see how the clues are nested? Like outermost brackets are red, one level of nesting is blue, next level of nesting is orange. My brain is having a hard time parsing all of the clues.
lobsterthief
I have the same feedback. Very creative and fun game but it’s giving me flashbacks to years of looking for mismatched curly braces and parentheses in code.
hydrogen7800
I was wondering if that is also part of the puzzle, trying to match the open and closed brackets, sort of like how excel highlights the corresponding parentheses when one is selected in the formula bar. This might be second nature for folks who code, but it requires a lot of focus for me.
JSoet
I've been playing now the last few days (really enjoying it, so thanks a lot!) and have a couple small suggestions that I don't see mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
- it would be nice to have a list of the incorrect guesses that you've made. Sometimes I come back after a while and can't remember if I already guessed something or if I just thought about guessing it but wasn't sure... Of course this also dovetails a bit with what some of the other people mentioned about guesses being counted as incorrect even when they're guessed early because then if you have a list of all earlier incorrect guesses then an earlier incorrect guess might now be correct, so I would also change that, that a guess which is only incorrect because it's not available yet isn't counted as incorrect, and instead it says something like "not yet!". Another related problem for me though was I got stuck once and it turned out I had just made a typo in my earlier guess and hadn't noticed, which is why it would be nice to see your earlier guesses. Oh, and also related, I think it counts multiple incorrect guesses of the same word (again not 100% sure since I couldn't see my earlier guesses)
- it would be nice to improve the stats, maybe give you some kind of distribution to see how you're doing, maybe on the calendar you could colour code to show what days you've done well and what days you did worse or something
dominicrose
As someone who speaks English but doesn't live in the US or any other English-speaking country, this game is hard! I wish there was one for my native language and country culture to see the difference it makes.
yungporko
i'm a native english speaker and even i can't complete most of these because it's so US-centric. this is virtually unplayable for non-americans, which is a shame because it's a really good game.
TreeInBuxton
Agreed - I went through a few past ones, and unfortunately it just felt like you had to be fairly familiar with US products, landmarks, etc
I loved the concept, just not some of the clues
treve
I'm curious why you opted for a custom keyboard vs the built in one. It's not as good and unlike worldle it doesn't seem to really take advantage from custom keys.
CivBase
Yeah, the keyboard ruins the fun I had playing this. It took 2-3 taps per letter on my phone for keys to register.
tjlingham
If you use the built in keyboard I imagine you have to continuously deal with the page resizing to avoid the keyboard, and potentially people not having easy access to an English keyboard.
The custom keyboard makes all the tools you need a first class component of the game.
But yes, it's currently a little clunky.
ahussain
This is awesome! I love the game.
My one piece of feedback is to improve the keyboard (if that’s at all possible). I regularly miss points because of typos even if I had the correct answer.
HellzStormer
That keyboard is seriously bad. If you start pressing the next letter before you release the previous letter, you get neither!
mNovak
Congrats, that's a great achievement!
I'd be very curious if you could share what that process looked like in general? Did they reach out to you, how did they find you?
Were they interested in the gameplay alone, or the player count / growth?
Was it much work, technically, to get integrated on their website?
And of course, how long does it take you generate one full puzzle?
mmoustafa
Second this, I've built some puzzle games (e.g. https://snoozpaper.com) but lacked distribution :)
nsagent
Congrats!
One little nitpick is that while I prefer hardmode for puzzles like this, on mobile (where I prefer to play such games), it's WAY too easy to misclick on the keyboard. I had "8 excess keystrokes," but those were all due to mistyping then deleting a single mistyped character (e.g. "ee" -> "er").
Not sure how to keep the essence of the skill-based approach, without the frustration induced by typing on a mobile keyboard.
Anyway, great job and congrats again!
thrance
I would suggest using the device's default keyboard on mobile. It feels rather awkward having to use qwerty instead of the azerty I'm used to.
smj-edison
Same here... I use Dvorak and it always takes me a second to reorient (perhaps they wanted to show that you can only use certain characters?).
vessenes
I love this! Just sent it to some friends. Like others - minor nit -- I can't see what words I've already guessed. I'd guessed a correct word and mistyped it -- took me a long while to try it again.
PebblesRox
Yes, being able to scroll down and check already entered guesses would be nice
I posted Bracket City to HN on February 24th and the game went live yesterday on The Atlantic (!)
The game will stay free to play (and not require logging in). Also, I'm still making all the puzzles!
HN provided the first real infusion of players that weren't my mom's friends. So thanks everyone.
FWIW The Atlantic's team is amazing and got this live exactly 2 weeks from when we signed the deal.
This happened quick and I feel very lucky. The HN community of solvers keeps me honest with much helpful technical and editorial feedback. I love it all -- here or at mayor@bracket.city
T[Tom who befriended a volleyball] HN
PS my original post! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43160542