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Show HN: Twixt – transform one word into another in four moves

8 pointsby unseen_formslast Thursday at 12:29 PM4 commentsview on HN

I made this game while working on a different project about teaching English spelling. I was reading about homophones and got struck by how much a homophone can transform the shape of a word, so I started experimenting with little games built on that.

I added a few more transforms, anagrams, verb/tense changes, but the answers kept coming out too obvious. I couldn't distort the word enough to make it interesting. The breakthrough was compound pairs. Jumping from one word to another through their compound (sea → horse, via seahorse) really obscures the path and that's when it suddenly got fun and unpredictable.

I've been sharing it with friends. I'm in the UK so mostly UK testers, fair warning that a couple of the homophones may lean British.

They've been playing daily and seem hooked, so it felt worth posting here. It's one puzzle a day mainly so I actually have time to hand pick puzzles that have a satisfying path. Today's puzzle is on the easy side but they can get really tricky. The name is from 'betwixt', the whole game is about moving between two words. I did clock afterwards that there's a 60s board game with the same name, but they're pretty different things.


Comments

giladdtoday at 3:52 AM

This is a pretty awesome little game, seems more rewarding than most something-le games I've seen. Will share with friends.

Will you / could you add access to past puzzles? That's the first thing I looked for but couldn't find.

csw-001last Thursday at 9:09 PM

Tough, but fun. Took me a couple times through to fully grok. Well done!

Will admit I got excited when I saw the name - I played (the other) Twixt with my Grandpa when I was a kid, it was super fun.

show 1 reply
patspamtoday at 2:57 AM

Nice idea, I enjoyed this and shared it with a few friends.