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I’m continuing to work on my daily puzzle game Tiled Words!

https://tiledwords.com

Forbes just wrote an article about it which was a fun surprise! [1]

It recently turned 6 months old which is wild to me. My wife and I have made a new puzzle every day for half a year! I wrote a blog post about this [2]

I recently released user logins. That went well and a lot of people are using them. I also let you filter the backlog by completed puzzles based on player feedback.

This week I’m going to start releasing player submitted puzzles and release my puzzle building tools. You can watch a video for a sneak peek of those tools. [3]

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2026/05/02/bored-o...

2. https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/six-months-of-tiled-wo...

3. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d8_zhMKd0Yg


Thank you for Tiled Words which I play regularly! I introduced it to a couple of friends and now they compete every day for the best time to finish :-)

While you're here if I could make a small suggestion - the wording of the 'type of' questions was confusing to me until I got used to it; 'stop' is not really a type of 'watch' for example, so maybe you could find a different way to phrase those? Maybe there isn't a neater way to encapsulate the idea of 'is a prefix or suffix to', I don't know, but I found it difficult. Anyway kudos to you and your wife, it's a great game!


To me a "stop watch" is a type of watch, that's straight forward. But there are other clues that rely on cultural references I'm not familiar with - and that is, I think, inevitable in this type of game. We all have different backgrounds and there's no universal shared understanding that would make every clue the same difficulty for everyone.

I saw someone on here recently say they like to do the puzzle without looking at the clues, and I've started doing that on and off too, it changes the game in an interesting way.


> To me a "stop watch" is a type of watch

Right but the answer in this case is not "stop watch" - the answer is just "stop". Name a type of watch: "stop".

> I saw someone on here recently say they like to do the puzzle without looking at the clues

Yeah I do that sometimes too, especially finishing off can be easier that way


Hey, that’s awesome, thanks for playing and sharing it!

Great feedback on the “type of” clues. I’ll need to noodle on that and see if there’s a clearer way to express it. Maybe I should just be doing blanks… e.g. for “sun” it could be “___ dress, ___day, or ___ flower”


IME crosswords traditionally say "Word before...". Also thanks for the game, I love it and was excited you used one of my submitted clues a few months ago.

Oh interesting. I’ll look for examples of that. If that’s an existing convention that may be the way to go.

Thanks for submitting clues! I always like reading through them to make the community puzzle


Yeah that would work! Or @progbits' suggestion of "goes with" works for me too.

In any case thanks for your consideration and thanks again for a great game!


Awesome, thanks for the feedback! Very helpful

How about "Goes with dress, day or flower"?

Ahh yeah, that's interesting thanks. I think the one difference is it's not clear if sun is meant to come before or after the word but maybe that's okay.

I'll think on this and experiment. Thanks


If the order is always the same maybe "goes before" or "goes after" would work too, but I like the ambiguity, and it's more .. I dunno, poetic?

Yea right now I do some clues before and some after.

Goes before/after is a good idea!


Great game. I've been mulling over how to make scabble game with a twist, and I think you achieved this beautifully. Congratulations!

Thanks! I'd be interested to see what you build if you continue with that! I think there are lots of interesting ways to spin off of Scrabble

This has had me hooked for weeks! Really delightful game. :)

Thanks! Right Words is also fun!

I never thought something would drag me out of HN before sleep. A nice break. Congrats and thank you.

Thanks for playing!

Fantastic, the scrabble lover in me will enjoy this.

Thanks! I played a lot of Scrabble growing up at my grandma's house so it's definitely an inspiration

I love Tiled Words, thanks for making it.

Thanks for playing!

This is really cool and addictive!

Thanks for checking it out!

If you enjoy it there’s a new puzzle every day and a backlog of over 200 puzzles free to play ;)


I've been playing this since it was first mentioned on HN a few puzzles in. It's a nice idea and pretty well executed.

I have, however, rejected making a user login. I recognise you're putting in time and energy to make something I'm just taking without payment, and it's your right to try to leverage it into something more - I wish you all the best in doing so - but asking for a user login as a gate to a feature you clearly don't need a user login for is enshittification.


Hey, thanks for the feedback. I didn't intend to pressure you to create an account. Sorry if I gave that impression.

I'm guessing you're referring to the ability to filter out completed puzzles from the archive? I added it for logged-in users first because it was simpler but I can extend that feature so it's available for everyone. (I'll need to add some alternate logic to pass your indexeddb levels to the server endpoint when fetching the archive. It's not complex. I just haven't prioritized it yet.)

I'll add this to my backlog and try to get to it after the player puzzles release.

Beyond that everything is available regardless of user account right now. I do plan to require an account to submit custom puzzles when that's released. (Mostly to make moderation easier. I may relax this down the line.)

EDIT: On further thought I realized it's also required to have an account to view and share your profile stats, though that could also work without an account with some changes.


Anything that requires server-side storage is a good reason to ask for an account, IMO. Theoretically you could assign a pseudo-account and store the id in client storage to have a shareable profile, but then you'll have to figure out how long you'll retain idle pseudo-accounts. (Assuming that completion detail is in client storage, at least for anonymous players).

A consequence of me being a freeloader too is that you don't have to change your plans to please me :-)


This is great :)

Thanks!

Yes, for a number of reasons:

- I am trying to learn about the topic at hand and trust a human's comment more than an LLM's guess - I am trying to connect with other humans to fulfill my social needs - I am maybe spending time to help another human out with a response because I want to help someone else - I am interested in the perspective of other humans

Those are just a few reasons. For each of those if it's actually an AI I feel I'm losing out on something.


Thank you! It's the dumbest term and I hear it thrown around way too often

I can't reply to the other comment because it's been flagged, but I just wanted to point out that I do not think employees should be treated like cattle. I was being sarcastic. I was using the language of tech bros to satirize the situation.

I'm actually shocked that people could take my comment at face value and not realize it was obviously sarcastic. That is eye opening.


Yeah that’s fair.

I can see how it was sarcastic on re-reading. It can be hard to tell online!

Sorry for the misunderstanding


What a sad way to think about other people

It is, but it’s the only way for a company to succeed and scale over time. A pet approach works well in the early days, but you can’t become a VC-backed success without drastically reducing bus factors throughout the company.

That could be an incentive to keep companies small, but high-scale companies do have unique benefits to society.


Employees are people. Not cattle or pets. It doesn't mean you don't ever fire or lay people off. But you treat them as humans.

Sounds like we need to prevent companies from scaling or being too successful.

> It is, but it’s the only way for a company to succeed and scale over time

This is absolutely not true. It never has been at any point in history. Not even CEOs would claim such a thing until the 1980s, and they were wrong then as now.

Even today, Costco and other businesses are thriving.

Stop drinking the Koolaid.


> Did you?

I would say I got better at both of those over the last 12-18 months. Are your skills static?


Compared to Claude or GPT 5.5? Yeah, my skills are static relative to the progress seen recently. So are yours, unless your grandpa was named von Neumann or Szilard.

My brain got better at thinking deeper when I stopped using llms.

Lmao why does it seem outlandish to other people? Perhaps they never thought too deeply in the first place to recognise it.


Hey, there’s a new feature that should help here!

On the past puzzles page you can now hide all puzzles you’ve completed to filter down to only uncompleted puzzles.


If there is poop on them you need to scrape it off.

We bought a pack of thin disposable diaper liners. These go inside the diaper and catch most of the business. They then get thrown away (but it’s much less waste/garbage than an entire diaper)

They do get their own load. The ones we have tell you to run them in the wash twice.


You throw away linen every time your kid wees?

Yes. Most people throw out an entire diaper each time (as discussed in the article)

The liners I’m describing are very thin and very small. Probably smaller than a marble if scrunched into a ball.

It’s not perfect but it’s much less than an entire diaper. It’s the compromise we found that works for us.


Sorry, I misread “liners” as “linens”, and it seemed just strange to have a disposable piece of linen paired with a cloth diaper. What you’re really describing seems like a great idea to make cloth diapers doable for weak-stomach people like me.

No worries!

Just wanted to second that the design is lovely

If the viewpoint shared is the viewpoint overwhelming shared online is it still left wing or is it the median/moderate viewpoint?

Could you share some examples of where you thought it was left wing?


Here are a couple of articles with examples:

Grok says Musk is fitter than Lebron and funnier than Jerry Seinfeld:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...

Grok didn't stop there. Elon is best in the world at drinking pee:

https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-gro...

Also randomly mentions white genocide out of nowhere (one of Elon's pet political issues)

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/elon-...


> Elon is best in the world at drinking pee

What? How does this not show willingness to insult Musk?


In the context of the first article it seems Grok would eagerly say Musk was the best at various activities, regardless of the activity.

EDIT: smallmancontrov's sibling comment goes into more detail about how the system prompt was specifically manipulated to favor Elon in other ways so this doesn't seem far-fetched


Now that 'tough guy' Chuck Norris has departed this world...

The AIs are looking for new defs for tough.


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