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Twixt

transform one word into another in four moves

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I made this game while working on a different project about teaching English spelling. I was reading about homophones and got struck by how much a homophone can transform the shape of a word, so I started experimenting with little games built on that.I added a few more transforms, anagrams, verb/tense changes, but the answers kept coming out too obvious. I couldn't distort the word enough to make it interesting. The breakthrough was compound pairs. Jumping from one word to another through their compound (sea → horse, via seahorse) really obscures the path and that's when it suddenly got fun and unpredictable.I've been sharing it with friends. I'm in the UK so mostly UK testers, fair warning that a couple of the homophones may lean British.They've been playing daily and seem hooked, so it felt worth posting here. It's one puzzle a day mainly so I actually have time to hand pick puzzles that have a satisfying path. Today's puzzle is on the easy side but they can get really tricky. The name is from 'betwixt', the whole game is about moving between two words. I did clock afterwards that there's a 60s board game with the same name, but they're pretty different things.

HN · launched May 21, 2026 · 20 upvotes (top 26%) · 0 views

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

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Could you build this?

Yes The game is a client-side word puzzle based on standard linguistic transformations (homophones, anagrams) that can be easily implemented with standard web tech and a word dictionary.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Wordle, Ladderfy

Concerns raised: Regional pronunciation differences make some puzzles unsolvable for certain audiences, Only one puzzle per day limits replayability and causes loss of interest, Game rules unclear about whether moves must lead to correct solution or just be valid, Difficult to understand mechanics without practice/example puzzle first, Dead ends frustrating when uncertain about move validity

Feature requests: Archive/access to past puzzles for unlimited play, Practice or example puzzle mode to learn rules before daily puzzle, Post-game practice mode to sharpen skills on puzzle components, Ability to specify which rule applies when move qualifies as multiple types

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 418 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #146 of 419 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 204 days after the earliest competitor.

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