I built some puzzle games
This is my first post on here, and I thought I'd kick things off with something close to my heart. If you know me you know I love puzzle games. Wordle, NYT Games, the LinkedIn games, I've played them all. I've been wanting to make my own for a while, and I finally did, so here they are.
A daily country-guessing game
Globeiku Geography
Globeiku is a daily country-guessing game, but there's no map. The game gives you real-world statistics about the mystery country (population, GDP, languages spoken) and you try to work out which country it is. Every wrong guess reveals another stat, so the puzzle opens up as you play, but you've only got a limited number of attempts.
It sits in the same space as Worldle and Globle, but removing the visual element changes the game completely. You can't triangulate on a globe or recognise a country's shape. You have to reason about the data, and it turns out most of us carry around a much vaguer picture of the world's demographics and economies than we think.
globeiku.com →A word logic game
Codextri Word Logic
Codextri is a word logic game that inverts the Wordle formula. Instead of guessing a hidden word, you're trying to identify three hidden letters. You submit five-letter words and the game colour-codes your guess to show how many of those three letters it contains. No positional hints, just how many of the secret letters appeared in your word.
The strategy is what makes it interesting to me. With only a count as feedback, you're doing a different kind of reasoning than in Wordle. You're trying to pick words that partition the remaining possibilities efficiently, but because there's no positional information, the overlap between guesses creates ambiguity that's hard to resolve cleanly. There are 2,600 possible letter triplets (26 choose 3), and I still don't know what the optimal opening word is, or whether there's a provably best sequence of guesses. It's similar in flavour to Mastermind, but the combinatorics are different enough that I haven't been able to port those results across. If anyone wants to take a run at it, I'm all ears.
codextri.com →Both games are free and there's a new puzzle each day. They were really fun to build and I hope they add a bit of fun (and challenge) to your day too. Give them a go.