Show HN: Gridogram – A quote for each day, hidden in a compact grid(gridogram.com)

Show HN: Gridogram – A quote for each day, hidden in a compact grid

https://www.gridogram.com/

I had a lot of fun playing an Android app where you have to find words in a random grid of letters (like Boggle). Challenge for me was to find the longest word... and seeing which I missed was a way to learn new words.

I've iterated on the concept, and made a game you can play in the browser, Gridogram: instead of being random, for each day a grid of letters is created from a quote or phrase of some sort that relates to the day.

For example, here's a grid that contains the Y Combinator motto [1]:

  E G I W
  L H N A
  P T M K
  S O E P

Finding words: connect horizontally, vertically or diagonally adjacent letters, without using the same letter twice.

An interesting challenge on the development side is figuring out whether a quote will fit in a grid, and creating it in a reasonable amount of time. A 5x5 grid is the biggest one I've made, and that has over 100 billion possible paths along which to fit the words. Sometimes the search never gets there, still working on it, and planning to write up the more interesting parts once I've fully wrapped my head around them.

Grateful to hear any thoughts on the game!

[1] "Make something people want"

6 comments

beardyw작년

Great puzzle, the quote works well. As to "all the words", half of them no human being has heard of- it would be good to limit that somehow.

jap작년

Thank you! Would never expect anyone to find all the words, but the full alphabetised list is useful to help box in the yellow words that are in the quote. Some of the words in the list are indeed pretty arcane, but I hope it can be interesting for players to see new words, and that those don't really interfere with the fun of the game. By the way, you can tap a word to see its definition.

beardyw작년

Also, I am always interested in the quotations, which are interesting and well chosen. Sadly the answer block doesn't link to anywhere where I can see the author or the quote, but I can't even select the text to do my own search. That would be a great help.

jap작년

Really appreciate the feedback, and glad you like the quotations. I haven't settled on whether to add links, but the text not being selectable wasn't intentional - have pushed a change to allow selecting the text, I hope that improves things.

ifonlyenigmax작년

Nice idea! Turning quotes into word puzzles is fun and smart. Sounds tricky to fit quotes in the grid — maybe some shortcuts could help?

jap작년

Thank you! Yes it is tricky... what kind of shortcuts do you mean? One optimisation I've done to narrow the search space is account for symmetry, that's a shortcut in a sense.