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Show HN: A to Z – A word game I built from a childhood road trip memory

https://a26z.fun/
13•jackhulbert•1d ago
Long time lurker here. My family had a pen-and-paper game we'd play on long drives to visit my great-grandmother. After she passed, I spent the holidays recreating it: https://a26z.fun

How it works:

Find 15 words from a category (like "Stone Fruits," "US States," or "Dog Breeds") as fast as you can. Once you meet the 15 word minimum, you can play for as long as you want.

Each letter shows how many target words start with it (A¹ = one word starts with A, N² = two words start with N)

That small ² in the bottom-right? Multi-word answers allowed. For "US States" with N², both "NEW YORK" and "NORTH DAKOTA" count

Unlimited guesses, 2 hints, and a shuffle button to reorder by frequency.

Example: Category: US States | Letters: A¹ M¹ N² S² Answers: ALABAMA, MONTANA, NEW MEXICO, SOUTH DAKOTA

If you're into Connections or Strands, this scratches a similar itch but with a deduction twist.

Comments

onychomys•1d ago
This is pretty fun! I'd suggest having the spellcheck suggestions not pop up correct answers (I typed "Ireland" and it asked if I meant Iceland, which was one of the answers I hadn't gotten to yet). And, for that matter, I'm not really sure why Ireland was wrong. I thought maybe it was because it shares its island with NI, but the DR shares its island with Haiti and DR was accepted.
cvoss•1d ago
And Haiti was not, which was a weird inconsistency.
jackhulbert•23h ago
Thanks for playing! Great feedback around the auto-correct.
rekttrader•22h ago
Ha! I am literally coding a roadtrip game as well. Really great work and congrats on your launch!
jackhulbert•21h ago
Thanks homie! Holler if you want someone to test.
BrenBarn•21h ago
Cool idea and pretty fun. At least for this particular puzzle (island countries) though, I found myself ignoring the feedback and first and just typing as many as I could think of. Then when I did look at the feedback, I mostly just cared about the first letter, not the stuff about number of words.

There are some glitches.

For some reason the size of the grid increased periodically, but I couldn't understand why.

There is inconsistency in the answers. As another commenter mentioned, Ireland was not included. The answers also included both East Timor and Timor-Leste, but these are the same country. Also it seems that Timor-Leste was counted as three words.

Might want to include some kind of ASCII comparison as many people aren't going to type "São Tomé and Príncipe" out.

The hints don't seem to take account of what answers have already been guessed, which makes them useless in many cases. People are probably most likely to ask for a hint when they just have a few left they can't think of; in that case it's kind of crucial that the hint actually be a hint for one of the ones they haven't already gotten.

lynn_xx•19h ago
I love this game. It’s just as fun as Wordle. My challenge is that I don’t always have enough background knowledge to guess all fifteen words, so I do it by Google at the end. Lol
snarf21•8h ago
This game was interesting but I found it very confusing.

* WARNING: SPOILERS *

* It is confusing when you are trying to find 15 words but then the 's top right number shows 23 and you are told that this means 23 answers start with R. If you have to have 15 out of X answers, I want to know the full set of words that there are 23 R words in. * After finding my fifth word, that answer was added below the puzzle and it cause the whole UI to relayout which was quite jarring. This kept happening as I added more answers. * You call the bottom right number the "superscript" which is confusing to me. Superscript is always above the character and subscript is always below it. * I typed in mayonnaise and was told it was wrong but tried mayo and it was right. I don't want to have to think of all variations of a thing spelled regionally or colloquially (ketchup > catsup) that are the same exact thing. * For condiments, it seems egregious that salt and pepper aren't right but every variation of salad dressing flavors and type of gravy are correct. * I don't really see the point of the numbers at all. It isn't like you can do any deduction since you are finding some very small subset from the list of legal answers. I'd much rather there was a curated list of exact 15 words and you have to find them from the set of all possible answers you can think of. Right now it is an exercise of name as many R foods as you can think of, repeat for each letter.

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