Show HN: I made a multiplayer crossword game(crosswordracing.com)

4 pointsby abstractbill2 lata temu3 comments

Show HN: I made a multiplayer crossword game

https://crosswordracing.com/crosswords/2024-12-16-19-0-42d9-frontpage.html

Hey HN, I’ve been working on this multiplayer crossword for a while now. There’s still so much more on my todo list for it, but I think it’s time to launch and get some feedback with what I have.

Every hour, a new crossword (13×13 or 15×15) is generated at https://crosswordracing.com If you prefer smaller/faster, every ten minutes, a new mini crossword (7×7 or 11×11) is generated at https://crosswordracing.com/mini

You’re playing each crossword at the same time as everyone else, racing to complete it first. You can’t see what you’ve got right, until you correctly complete the entire grid. But you get some fun feedback on what other players are doing: a cell turns green if one other player has correctly solved it, orange if two other players have, and red if three or more other players have entered the correct letter in that cell.

Chat is emoji-only for the first half of the game (i.e. 30 minutes for the front-page, 5 minutes for the mini). After that, it unlocks and you can chat freely.

If you’re not done when the next crossword is generated, you can just stay on the current page for as long as you like and keep working to solve it.

I didn’t manage to get user accounts done before my arbitrarily-imposed launch date, so everyone is anonymous for now. I definitely want to build accounts, streaks, trophies, etc. The other big thing I’m excited to build is a “team mode”. You should be able to play on a team, where you can chat freely with your team-mates, and the cell colors indicate what the other team has (collaboratively) got correct. I think that would be a lot of fun.

Thanks for reading, checking it out, and for any feedback. Feel free to ask me anything, of course.

3 comments

abstractbill2 lata temu

I didn't notice HN had replaced the link (https://crosswordracing.com) by the current (at the time) redirect. If you want to go to the current front-page game, you should visit https://crosswordracing.com

Edit: If anyone has any interest in how I'm generating the crosswords feel free to reach out. It was a fascinating problem to solve, and I'm not aware of any better automatically-generated crosswords than these right now.

super7ramp2 lata temu

Thank you for sharing your work! It looks great.

I’m interested in knowing how you generate crosswords. Can you tell us more about that?

abstractbill2 lata temu

Thanks for the kind words, I will try to get something written up about it.