alt Hacker News32/36: Are you the author? People is friendlier when the author is around answering questions. How are the events selected? Some are well known and some are very local.
The point system is easier to explain if each unselected spot transform into a star that flies to the point counter.
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Yes, I'm the author and this is a hobby project of mine. The events are both gathered and "verified" with AI every day. I have tried to come up with a large variety of categories, aiming to make it both interesting, challenging and fun for people from all over the world. But the span of categories could definitely be improved. I had a couple of iterations on both the points system and the layout a few months ago, and felt satisfied with it. Thanks for the suggestion, I will definitely take it into consideration for further work on the site.
I saw that it also made its way onto Metafilter - did you by any chance have anything to do with that?
32/36 too.
Having very local/niche events (especially near the end, when there are lots of places to go wrong) makes it feel unballanced. If you wanted to make the game more strategic and less "gotcha," you might want to have all the events available at the same time, or have a "come back to this item" option that would allow the user more control.
On a related note, there are only about 40320 possible choice paths (8!), making it about as rich as tic-tac-toe (though the context certainly makes the player think more), far lower than something like Wordel's (26⁵)⁵. Adding more decisions might make people take more ownership of their wins.