Show HN: I've built a words game based on binary search

I'm very interested to know why 7 letters was deemed most appropriate, I could not come up with more than 2 words and had to get a dictionary to find.

Maybe I've played wordle too much...

Not to get a spoiler, but the post-game definition given for today's word (rot13: ybatrfg) uses an obscure secondary verb form instead of the much more common usage...

I loaded the puzzle and was presented with an empty 7 character prompt. I tried typing in three different seven-letter words, and each time I hit "GO", I was told the word was "Not in the word list".

With no further guidance given, I closed the tab.

The "up/down" arrows are a bit confusing, I don't think it's self-evident whether "later in the alphabet" would be considered "higher" or "lower".

"left" or "right" might be clearer, at least for English, and it would map directly to the range bar visualizations beneath each letter.

Really cool. Everyone's given feedback about the length and such but mine is about the keyboard: it feels like the high/low/allowed colours should update as you go from slot to slot but they don't so it's pretty useless.

I see a lot of people saying 7 letters is too long, but I feel like the additional hints about where to go when you guess wrong helps make up for that.

It took me a minute to get what was going on and I wasted a few guesses but I like that it requires a new strategy.

I was able to adapt my first go-to wordle words to 7 letters and realized that they should be different because of what you learn from guess to guess.

I suck at wordle and got this in like 7 guesses. Is your model to keep it on your site or do you plan to license the game?

Cool in principle, but I had an awful lot of trouble finding 7 letter words on the wordlist.

Fun game. The concept is good. However:

I couldn't find the go button for a while...finally realized it was part of the keyboard...that could be better

I don't get the colors on the keys, as intuitively it seems like it should be the available letters in the current position, but they don't change based on the letter spot I would be currently typing in.

I wanted to share my result with a friend who loves word games, but there was no share button. Also pasting the link does not come up with a web preview in slack/messengers.

It would be nice to be able to go back and play past days.

In terms of difficulty,hard but achievable. Might think on a difficulty slider, or a climb (first solve 5 letter, if won, 6, then 7?

Cool idea. This might be a time where an option to have an alphabetically ordered keyboard would be useful.

By the way, I like testing AIs on new games as they aren't in the training data and gpt5.6 sol high thinking was able to get from my second guess result to the correct answer. One letter was already locked and four more were down to a five letterish range. Still impressive as I remember models up until about the second generation of reasoning models really struggling with games like wordle.

I recently did the same (made a daily game) and I am approaching 100k plays since March. https://plot-hole.com - the best thing so far about this app has been the analytics which you can check out here: https://plot-hole.com/daily-analytics-82u4fhrvw

I love word games and this was pretty fun. One recommendation I have is to have the most recently typed word at the top rather than the bottom, so that it's easy to reference when typing your next word. There could be plenty of reasons against that and I'm no game designer but that's what popped into mind. I'll definitely try more, this is a fun idea!

Very clever! My main issue with Wordle is that it feels like it's largely a question of chance, but this one feels like there's a lot more strategy involved.

The high/lo feels unintuitive to me .. Down on a P makes me thing R-Z not A-O.

I actually think left/right is a more clear visual and mental model.

I like the game and it is quite difficult sometimes to come up with a legal word that gives you an improved anchor point for the binary search.

I really like this, it kind of reminds me of "Hangman"!

A few ideas, if you don't mind:

1. Have a "normal" mode and "master" mode, where the normal mode has words with maybe 5 letters and the master mode uses 7 letters

2. Have an archive of previous games - kinda sucks that I can't play the old ones!

3. Contrast on the up/down arrows on letters isn't clear enough, at least not for me (colour blind)

I think a practice mode, or letting people play the older games would be good. I can think of a few older people who would love this, but would definitely need a few tries to get the hang of it.

I agree with everyone else who’s commented up to this point. But I’ll say what they’re saying more clearly: it’s a bit too difficult. I love the idea though.

Looks good. What's with the submit buttons being put on the left on virtual game keyboards, even though Return/Enter usually on the right on typical keyboards. Wordle also does this.

Wow this is pretty hard. I usually do well with word games, this one not so much. I may have just dodged being nerdsniped if I can just let it go.

7 letter words are too long. I'm finding trouble thinking of any.

I don't get it. I type a word and nothing happens?

Think this needs calibration, it's way too hard!

No archive of previous games?

this feels like a fun premise!

As feedback, I think I'd enjoy it more with shorter words or more guesses

I like the idea but it takes a lot of thinking power that I have to come up with actual words that long each time.