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Wirespan, a daily power grid optimization puzzle I made for my son

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This was a lot of fun to build! I have an autistic son who is extremely interested in power lines, electrical transmission towers, and how the grid works. I decided to build a little game for him. When I finally showed it to him with bated breath, he rolled his eyes and said, “Is it 3D? I’ll only like it if it’s 3D!” So, I decided to polish it up and release it to the world!You get a 9x9 map with one power plant, three houses, and terrain obstacles, and the goal is to connect the power plant to the houses with an optimal path.Beneath the coat of paint, it’s a graph theory optimization puzzle, very nearly a Steiner-tree puzzle. Any two nodes within Chebyshev distance 2 are wired together automatically. But the wires travel in Euclidian space, so reach is measured on a square and wire on a circle. The skill is balancing that asymmetry to find the shortest route to light up the whole map.Because the original goal of this project was to provide joy to my son, I’ve done my best to make it accessible to everyone. It’s localized into 18 languages so far, has a high-contrast mode meeting AAA standards, reduced motion mode, etc.I do collect usage telemetry to help me improve the game, but I’ve done my very best to take privacy very seriously, collecting anonymous stats about the gameplay itself, with a random id the game generates rather than anything about the player or device. I also generate the privacy policy directly from the analytics code, as a contract to ensure nothing is ever collected without being fully disclosed.I had a really great time with this project, and hope to continue to improve it! I’d love any feedback I can get! Please let me know if you have any questions, and I’ll stick around to answer them!(Reposting because my first attempt landed during a super quiet hour and didn't really get seen)

HN · launched Aug 25, 2026 · 12 upvotes (top 36%) · 0 views

Niche: browser puzzle games · 310 launches, 26 in the last 7 days ▼ -7% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Energy & climate
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes This is a 2D tile-based grid puzzle game with daily seed generation and simple graph traversal rules, easily implementable in browser JavaScript/Canvas.

Discussion

7 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Buy Me a Coffee, Ko-fi, Electricity Maps

Feature requests: Leaderboard for daily puzzle scores, Tip jar/donation link on personal site

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 485 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #202 of 486 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 300 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.