New: Hex Boards

[admin]

Hex Boards went live today for those interested in a new challenge. The usual Wordtwist rules apply, only now the board is made of hexagons instead of squares, and you can link any letters that share a side. Minimum four letters per word, with usual scoring applied.

Hex boards will have their own separate competition/trophies/etc.

As always with any new feature, please let me know if you notice anything strange/unusual or any glaring bugs in the new game.

Cheers!
Stephen

[JJBeanie]

I don't know if this is a glitch, but I just played a 6x6 game had this happen as I was typing. I see that it's also on the new hex boards. Frankly, it's awful and off putting. It often incorrectly assumes where I want to start the word and then jumps around as I keep typing. Stephen, please remove it from 6x6 at least. I tried a 5x5 afterwards and it's not there.

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[JJBeanie]

I was the first to play this hex game yet it didn't indicate that I had the longest word record!


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[admin]

Automatic highlighting can now be turned on/off via a text link at the bottom of each board, same way sounds are handled.

Longest word bug should also be fixed.

Thanks!

[JJBeanie]

Ok, so I'm really not a fan of the highlighting of letters as I type, nor the red lines, nor the light yellow highlighting of valid next letter choices. Plus, it's immediately obvious when an invalid next letter is typed because the red line doesn't move.

All these things are distracting, make the game harder to play, and really dumbs it down.


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Edited to add: I was typing this post as you were posting about turning off highlighting. Have checked it out and it works. Thanks, Stephen.

[silk]

guess i will enjoy the novelty of being a record-holder while it lasts

[crazykate]

I like the highlighting feature when swiping. Wasn't expecting a whole new game today, thank you!

[Spike1007]

OK, these are kind of fun. One thing is that "empty" boards do count as played.

Never mind. They count toward lifetime stats, but not the current month.

[komil4]

A fun new surprise. Thank you

[BoggleOtaku]

A suggestion for hex and maybe word twist. Make a different sound for
1 not a word.
2 accepted word.
3 already played.

I don't have time to look down at the text to see the reason it was not accepted and whether I mispelled and should try to type again.

This would be a helpful time saver to use the sound to distinguish.

Thanks for the hex, fun to try. Agree that the yellow doesn't quite work for me. Maybe too helpful in some cases (alerts me to letter I may not have noticed yet if it highlights a position I didn't mean) and distracting other cases. It wouldn't guess wrong if it highlighted all possible combos of letters I type and whittle down as i add more letters, but this seems overly complicated.

[BoggleOtaku]

Just as a first quick guess: we'll see fewer words for board with around same number of letters in hex vs original style (current is slightly more letters than 5x5, probably comparable to).

with 6 possible network connections between letters instead of 8, numbers of possible networks connections to form words drop off much more quickly with a comparison ratio of (6/8)^N. So on order of 1/3 the number of combinations at N=4 letters, 1/10 at N=10, 1/100 at N=20.

Boards that have few planned large words per board, should still be about plan in 25 letter words, but probabilities of other words that do not appear as a sub sequence in the large word in these boards (ie pseudorandomly appearing) should drop off at the rates above, so fewer words per board.