Build your own Bracket City puzzle
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Hi HN — Bracket City is the word puzzle game I made earlier this year and (in part thanks to this community, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622719) managed to license to the Atlantic in April.The game has been growing a lot and I wanted to share the latest: a tool that lets anyone make a Bracket City puzzle — specifically a “Bracket Suburb”!I made this tool to help me construct puzzles, and I’ve been using it every day for months.After the Atlantic launch, I started to get the occasional inquiry about whether there was a way to make your own puzzle. One guy wanted to make a Bracket City puzzle part of a puzzle hunt he made to propose to his girlfriend (he did it!), and that convinced me it would be fun to make something publicly available.I got the Atlantic on board with the idea, and we are launching it today with an "example" custom puzzle: a Halloween/horror-themed puzzle by my pal Wyna Liu of NYT Connections fame.https://suburbs.bracket.city/wynaAnd we've got few other fun "celeb" puzzles lined up for later this year.The thought is that folks can use the builder to make custom puzzles for birthday wishes/event invites/insults/proposals/break ups in addition to “normal” Bracket City puzzles.I'm also hoping to learn more about the potential of the format – crossword puzzles have benefited so much from the creativity of constructors – I'm hoping bracket puzzles do the same.The good news is that it’s way easier to construct a bracket puzzle than a crossword. Once you try it, you’ll see why: you have many more degrees of freedom. In a crossword, each added word increases the level of constraint exponentially — every new entry sharply reduces the remaining options for completing the grid. Bracket puzzles are the opposite: as you add clues, you expand the available fodder for new ones.Anyway, I would love any/all feedback and to try puzzles created by folks here. I’m hoping we will figure out a way to highlight the best community puzzles on the Atlantic soon!PS and please keep playing the main game / sending me feedback / denouncing me on the subreddit
HN · launched Oct 31, 2025 · 32 upvotes (top 19%) · 1 view
Niche: browser puzzle games · 310 launches, 26 in the last 7 days ▼ -7% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Content generation
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 310 launches in browser puzzle games →
Could you build this?
Yes A builder interface for a word puzzle game involves straightforward client-side state manipulation, input validation, and URL-based puzzle state serialization.
Discussion
8 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Sven's Sudoku Pad, Cracking the Cryptic
Concerns raised: Mobile: no way to enter a space character, Emoji linkage between clues doesn't work well, Difficult to create meta-references between clues like in crosswords
Feature requests: Color highlighting/selection for clues (preset color palette), Option to turn off bracket display, Custom colors for each clue, Fixed-width puzzle display option
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 351 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #53 of 352 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 2 days after the earliest competitor.
- Tiled Words, a daily puzzle inspired by board games and crosswords · hn · 2025-10-29 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- I made a retro falling block puzzle, with a twist ;) · hn · 2026-09-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- March Madness Bracket Challenge for AI Agents Only · hn · 2026-03-17 · 67 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- My daily word puzzle Jointter revisited · hn · 2026-11-09 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- The HN Arcade · hn · 2026-01-28 · 352 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Daily word puzzle game based on polysemy · hn · 2026-05-21 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Linex · hn · 2026-02-24 · 82 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Wirespan, a daily power grid optimization puzzle I made for my son · hn · 2026-08-25 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.46
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