Subject: wordbox

This may help: it’s almost always the one above what I select, I don’t think it happens to left/right, may happen below but I know it’s mostly above. But it’s like it glitches when I try to deselect because if I click back on it, sometimes it highlights one above but like diagonal to it. 

So like if it happens on first letter and I hit row 5 column 3, it may select row 4 column 3, and when I hit row 4 col 3 again to deselect it, it instead swaps with row 3 col 4 usually or row 3 col 5 maybe but I think usually closest diagonal. If it happens on first letter I press, sometimes I’m able to deselect. If not, it usually swaps with one directly above or directly above and closest right. Not always but often. Does that make sense? I’m being careful when I press to not hit top of letter box, too. I aim towards lower so it won’t. And if it happens with 2nd letter of a swap, I’m not entirely sure if it’s usually above/diagonal or if it’s just any in the region. I will say it never false swaps with any far above and I think it tends to swap with letter above and to right of grid, I don’t notice it selecting any on left of grid, from memory.

if it were a car and my alignment was off, it’d be pulling me to the right. But above and right of grid. In fact I think I tend to notice more with letters I’m selecting at lower right of grid? I’ll have to note as I play more and hopefully I can help. But just fyi I still love playing even if that happens sometimes, and some games it doesn’t. 

Go - I tried wordbox with Chrome on my iPad. No issues. You can set a "zoom" factor on Chrome but that option was grayed out for me. There's a tweaky way to enable it so I did. Doesn't affect the display cuz Eric is using <CANVAS> and doing his own drawing.  But I still didn't see any issues with registration.  Zoom has been a problem for Freecell which is why I immediately suspected it.

Can you try with Safari? That's the built-in Apple browser.

Incognito mode probably won't affect anything tho it might mess with the game's storing of your game state.

Side note: I see Eric has added an animation when you get a double swap. Nice!

MrFixit aka Denny

What time does it change to the next day?

I didn't remember until 11:45pm ET today, and it seemed to remain constant.

Stupid game!

https://wordbox.game

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24 Aug 2024  C: 23 swaps

JK. Might be more like “stupid me.” 

Damn, almost!

https://wordbox.game

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24 Aug 2024 : 225 swaps

"225 swaps"

That's impressive.

"What time does it change to the next day?"

Midnight in Chicago.

Eric, I'm really enjoying wordbox.  Definitely a fun and addictive puzzle.  Could you answer a few more questions?  I'm wondering if you play; and, if so, are you any good?

Along those same lines, have you sent this to any of the known crossword gurus out there?  I'm guessing if you were highly skilled at crosswords, and figured out the whole grid before making a move, you'd always be getting one of, if not The, lowest score based on number of swaps.  A young man by the name of Paolo Pasco, who edits the daily mini-crossword for the Atlantic Magazine, is the current champion from the most recent crossword puzzle competition.  He's definitely an all-time crossword all-star.  It would be interesting to know how well he would do at wordbox.

Henry Hook would be another puzzle guru who I'd like to see try wordbox.  Here's a great article about him from 20+ years ago:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/04/the-riddler

Does anybody really know what time it is?

Chicago

https://wordbox.game

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28 Aug 2024  C: 16 swaps

My best score ever! Even though it was on one of the extra puzzles, I'm still damn proud.

https://wordbox.game

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28 Aug 2024 : 19 swaps 

Good puzzle today. Funny how I think things are good that I do well on.

@Kaos -- yes, I do play this game, and I am not particularly good at it.  With my coworkers, we often compare scores, and I do not usually "win".

I do like the idea of seeing what a real expert might be able to do.  So far, it consistently seems this puzzle is harder than it looks.  I've been trying to write a "bot", and even that is turning out to be harder than I expected.

I'm toying with writing a little program/macro to help me with the game. I'm using Kedit as the text editor I'm familiar with which has a sophisticated macro language. 

I had decades ago written a Kedit macro to solve the substitution cypher they publish in the daily paper Cryptoquips. I had an assist mode, a word lookup hotkey (to match already-guessed letters) and an full autosolve, so had experience with something slightly similar. 

It ought to be able to solve it, but.... when I did try just typing commands in my text editor (versus writing a macro, but individual commands would be a precursor to a macro), I was using the Official Scrabble Player Dictionary version 3 (OSPD3) word list because I have that in a text file.  Well one of the words that day was "homies" which wasn't in the OSPD3. 

So trying to decide whether to continue this diversion of writing a program.

I would like to see more than 4 puzzles per day and record of the scores. 

https://wordbox.game

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31 Aug 2024 : 18 swaps

blank screen today, I tried FF and Falkon on my PC, Chrome on my phone

console:

Plugin quad_blob is present in JS bundle, but is not used in the rust code. gl.js:1438:25
hiding the loading div

Sebc, you play this game? Is it easy for a Frenchman? I would give it a try if it were in my language, maybe.

I'm not into the word games that much. I more like playing with numbers.

Yeah I think it was down for a bit. 

Yep.  A bit of an outage this morning.  My fault.  Fixed.

Hop - I used to play online scrabble against an Indian woman I worked with and she reliably creamed me. She also had a very rich vocabulary of English swear words.

Today’s puzzle was a beast! Nicely done, Eric et al. 

MrFixit, Nope, this game is not for me. I'm more into something like this.

What is that? Some kind of perverted hex Sudoku?!?

It looks like groups of 13 which each have A-D and 1-9. and each line and column has one of each.

Tricky!

https://wordbox.game

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2 Sep 2024 : 27 swaps

"Sebc, you play this game? Is it easy for a Frenchman? I would give it a try if it were in my language, maybe."

Hop, not really easy as some words are unknown to me but with the position arrows plus some rules such as Y is most of the time at the end or beginning of a word, I can make it. It's fun and quick game

today's one

https://wordbox.game
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2 Sep 2024 : 32 swaps

If anyone wants autographs, photo ops, etc. I’d understand. I’d offer cloth samples from these jammies but, how shall I put it, I wear Jammie’s down to just threads and holes.

https://wordbox.game

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2 Sep 2024  B: 13 swaps

13 is an awesome score. I only play the primary game, but I've not seen a score that low. 

Well done, Fixit. I can't match that.

https://wordbox.game
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2 Sep 2024  B: 15 swaps

Sometimes there's just some luck. I hit a bunch of "doubles" just trying to get a single letter in place. That was just fortuitous, not skill.

https://wordbox.game

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7 Sep 2024 : 18 swaps

I thought I was getting better but I’m getting mediocre.

Wordbox is a funny game. You can feel like a genius and finish with a score that is well off the daily best. Other days, the most painful game can be a top score. 

I have an approach that works for me that consistently gets me within a move or two of the top score. But, whether or not I “break the tape” depends on a significant amount of luck. It’s a great challenge. 

16 today?!?

Well done.

Yeah that was a small grid.

I'm gonna start another thread about strategy.

MrFixit

Thank you for the tips on strategy;  it has improved my score and made it a more demanding cognitive challenge.

Getting that one word out of the way does help.

https://wordbox.game

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10 Sep 2024 : 20 swaps

Buzz - I'm sure I know what word you're talking about. I actually knew that word but nothing could have prepared me for the strange sequence of consonants and vowels.

Puzzle B was the one that really had be scratching my head, though, as I flat out didn't know 3 of those words.  Eric usually does a pretty good job of picking words we know but wow, that one was tricky.

That's part of the battle though, knowing you might not know a word.

Part of the kick of this game is their “gonzo” approach — forget the conventional rules, and no such thing as a bad surprise. 

Although I am certainly aware of the word in question, I had narrowed down the final four letters to a combination of just three letters, never imagining that the word in question was lurking. 

I normally don’t play the A game or beyond, but your comments intrigued me. I did a “speed solve” (mid-20s on both) and had one word in each the A and B that I did not know at all. Fascinating. 

My response to Eric and the gang: keep it coming!!

Tbf now that there are threads about strategy and more people potentially starting to figure out how to play the game more economically, realistically the best 'defence' that the creator has is to use more and more obscure words, so I imagine this'll become a regular thing.

Currently:

For the main puzzle, we try to avoid obscure words.

For the extra puzzles, we do not.

Wow. I thought I was doing well on the "B" puzzle today. Then I saw that someone got it in 11.

https://wordbox.game
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11 Sep 2024  A: 18 swaps

The A was the one with the 11. 

Took me 17.

https://wordbox.game

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11 Sep 2024  A: 17 swaps

After seeing the earliest discussions of Wordbox, I am obviously late to this group.  I have enjoyed the game considerably for the last few days but have yet to understand the bar graph on the Score page.  I can see that left to right shows how you did swap-number wise but still have no clue about the height of "my" blue bar or how some of the bars can remain blank. Can someone help me out?

The far left hand side of the graph shows the lowest score recorded that day (at the time you are viewing). As you noted, your bar is blue. The height of the blue bar is proportional to the number of people with your score. The bars to the left of the blue bar had a lower score than yours, and those to the right had higher scores (more letter swaps than you needed to solve the game). The height of each bar represents the fraction of players with that score. The far right hand side is not the worst score that day; that score captures 95% of the scores, and some higher scores will be found beyond. 

"Blank" bars (actually, bars with zero height) means no players had that score today. If your blue bar is the farthest bar to the left, and there are "blank" bars immediately to the right, that means you obliterated the competition. 

Oh Buzz.............that sounds *so* much like histo-rionics. 

Too much ‘splaining for some, but the tortoise did ask…