[HN Gopher] Uncrossy
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Uncrossy
Author : dgacmu
Score : 171 points
Date : 2026-01-12 01:39 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (uncrossy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (uncrossy.com)
| nottheg wrote:
| I love this!
|
| Haven't yet really tried the full level but really liked the
| tutorial, and the quality of the build
|
| update - wow the actual level is better ;)
| nottheg wrote:
| Also OMG I've just read your bio - I saw and wondered what
| someone more from the software side (rather than philsophy) would
| say: https://open.substack.com/pub/mcauldronism/p/the-
| maintenance...
| eru wrote:
| Seems like the same idea as treating your LLM as a compiler.
|
| When you write code in Rust and user your compiler to produce
| an x86 binary, you don't maintain the binary. If you want to
| make a change, you toss away the old binary, change your Rust
| code, and recompile.
| codingdave wrote:
| That concept has been floating around a few places recently. It
| is wishful thinking. Your userbase won't accept constant small
| changes in UX, functionality, or the same bugs returning every
| time you update the production code. And that is what you will
| get if you run a non-deterministic compiler that hallucinates.
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| I love games where the rules can be understood in seconds
| romanhn wrote:
| That was fun until I got to the point where no progress could be
| made and I had to undo a whole bunch of times to get to a
| workable configuration. Perhaps add a notification of some kind
| that I've gotten myself in that situation, rather than letting me
| kill a bunch of time solving an unsolvable puzzle. Still, very
| enjoyable!
| trueno wrote:
| lmao same. actually a really cool fun/concept it's definitely
| wordle popularity caliber, but once i got to the last 3 words
| and ended up in this scenario and the hint button said that i
| was like -_- owned.
|
| not sure what the right game experience would be for that. a
| notif that says "You can still solve more words but you'll
| never solve them all!" doesn't quite work here, because it's
| sort of saying "there's only one _right_ way to win, but good
| luck figuring out the right order". Still, it would be better
| than me finding that out at the very end.
|
| it would probably be pretty important to design levels so that
| the unwinnable states can't happen early in the game, but it's
| getting a little abstract to think about at this point. sort of
| brings me back to that unblock it game from the old ipod touch
| days.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| maybe a percentage chance of solving puzzle tracker that
| updates a bit randomly slow so you don't necessarily know right
| away that you made a mistake, although it would have to be a
| bit weird, for example when you start you are not at 100% of
| solving puzzle.
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| There could be a 2 player game where whoever gets stuck (or
| empty board) loses.
| BoppreH wrote:
| Same here. On yesterday's puzzle I got into an unwinnable state
| on my very first move, using the topmost word (spoiler: I made
| "hut" instead of "out").
| aszlig wrote:
| There is a "Auto-hints" setting that should highlight the undo
| button in red once you're in an unwinnable state:
| https://uncrossy.com/settings.html
| emzo wrote:
| Yes it's annoying, but that's part of the puzzle right?
| jrboyens wrote:
| Very nice. Easy to accidentally cheat, however. Shift a word to
| an invalid position, but right click instead of letting the mouse
| up event fire. Then shift the word back to the original position:
| win!
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This is really, really cool. I think telling me how many moves I
| have to go back in the hint was absolutely a must-do, and
| shouldn't cost two hints... Second-guessing every single move I
| made would be insane, but knowing I had to go back seven, and
| pick something different than the last thing I restored, that
| worked fine.
|
| It's easy to assume making a word disappear is always the right
| choice, but you forget it changes the word it leaves behind as
| well. Very clever.
|
| It does have the same quirk Wordle had that bugged me: Treating
| browser storage as useful in our multidevice world.
| degamad wrote:
| > It's easy to assume making a word disappear is always the
| right choice, but you forget it changes the word it leaves
| behind as well. Very clever.
|
| It's also easy to make the opposite assumption, that the goal
| is to change the other word. I initially felt weird about
| changing from a letter at position 3 to the same letter at
| position 1, but eventually realised that the goal is just to
| slide the word around, not necessarily to make a new word.
| mb7733 wrote:
| Really fun. The undo/redo functionality is much appreciated.
| incr_me wrote:
| Fun! On first thought, I'd prefer knowing when I'm in an
| unwinnable state instead of having to keep clicking the hint
| button.
|
| Also, the site worked for me in Chrome but doesn't work in
| Firefox (145.0.2). Do `window.cookieManager = ...` (or even `var
| cookieManager = ...`) instead of `const cookieManager = ...`.
| This goes for all variables in the global lexical scope you
| intend to share across source files.
| eru wrote:
| Worked for me in Firefox 146.0.1.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| Ditto.
| Grom_PE wrote:
| It doesn't work when uBlock Origin blocks
| uncrossy.com/js/cookieManager.js?v=7
| incr_me wrote:
| Oh, that's it. My bad!
| truekonrads wrote:
| Cute. Lots of "-ed" matching tho
| Snacklive wrote:
| Fantastic work, very fun ! I actually only ran into the dead end
| scenario right until the last few words so not a frustrating
| first experience. But reading other comments maybe a setting to
| prevent the player to take a route that ends up unsolvable would
| be great. Kinda like the "Normal" and "Expert" Modes in worldle
| mlavgn wrote:
| I was hoping this was like the game Crossy Road, but your goal
| was to throw yourself into traffic
| mastermedo wrote:
| Love the idea. It's fun to play.
|
| I didn't like that it's possible to leave the underlying word
| unchanged by dragging the word containing a letter twice to the
| second occurence.
| Tiberium wrote:
| Was a bit disappointed when I almost "solved" it but couldn't
| solve the last 2 words, finally clicked the hint and it told me
| to undo 12 times.. would have preferred if there was a warning
| earlier.
| oliwary wrote:
| Nicely done! This is an excellent experience, both visually and
| gameplay wise.
|
| The only thing that felt a bit weird was being able to change the
| word to the same word, if the slid word had the same letter
| twice.
| deviation wrote:
| I love it. My bets are on that this idea will be stolen and
| turned into some micro-transaction plagued app on store before
| the end of the week.
| greener_grass wrote:
| Tutorial was pretty confusing to me. I formed "HIM" and it
| rejected it, no explanation why.
| sp8 wrote:
| Oh that was way more fun than I expected! I feel I shall be
| playing this regularly!
| spuz wrote:
| This was really fun. I actually went back to the beginning of the
| archive to find more puzzles to solve. I think it would be nice
| if when you have solved one of the historical puzzles it would
| give you a button to click onto the next day's puzzle.
|
| I actually never came across the situation where my grid was
| unsolvable. As I was playing I was wondering what kind of
| algorithm you used to come up with grids that have no possible
| dead ends. Since this is clearly an issue, I wonder if it's
| possible to come up with puzzles that always have a solution
| similar to how the algorithm for creating Sudoku puzzles always
| guarantees it can be solved without guessing.
| immibis wrote:
| There's a dead end in today's puzzle, if you make TIGHT instead
| of RIGHT, and the hint will tell you you're at a dead end.
| latexr wrote:
| It's stuck at "Loading..." on both Brave with no extensions and
| Safari with adblockers. It was only after I tried it on Firefox
| without anything that I realised the cookie banner is the issue.
| perlgeek wrote:
| In Firefox with ublock origin, I got in the console:
|
| "Loading failed for the <script> with source
| "https://uncrossy.com/js/cookieManager.js"." looks like a false
| positive in the ad blocker. Allow-listing the site fixed it.
| jnovacho wrote:
| In tutorial, it did not accept HIM as a solution, because it
| wanted DIM. Kinda confusing.
| tobr wrote:
| You have to form a new word. It starts as HIM.
| xibbie wrote:
| The finishing move on Jan 1st was gorgeous, nice work!
| earlyriser wrote:
| Yes, it was a complete wow moment.
| knuckleheads wrote:
| thanks for your comments, got me to play that one, and it's
| great. very well done!
| moritonal wrote:
| Okay, amazing. (https://uncrossy.com/index.html?p=2026-01-01)
| alvsilvao wrote:
| Cool game!
| glkindlmann wrote:
| The website says "I basically need to design puzzles in reverse
| and have built a set of tools to help me with that." Does that
| mean that each day's puzzle is essentially built by hand? It
| seems like an interesting and non-trivial search problem to
| automatically generate puzzles, given a dictionary.
| rjagnow wrote:
| Uncrossy creator here. Yes, I design each by hand using a
| highly custom editor that I built to help with many of the
| common challenges. People keep asking me if it's a job that AI
| could do, but I think it would be really hard to get right.
| There's a lot of craft in building the shape of the puzzle and
| picking words that allow as many spaces as possible to get
| filled in.
| glkindlmann wrote:
| That's super cool! Thanks for explaining. Just to clarify
| myself - when I was thinking of automation I was not thinking
| of AI, or at least not how its popularly understood these
| days. I was thinking more like how 2D mazes can be
| automatically made by non-AI methods. Uncrossy would need a
| kind of constraint solver that can navigate words lexically
| and the spatial intersection of words (and their possible
| slides). I'm certainly not telling you anything you don't
| know. There are some algorithms for these (general) kinds of
| constraint satisfaction problems and they long pre-date "AI",
| but I think the application to uncrossy and refinement would
| be quite challenging.
| phyzome wrote:
| Oof, visiting the settings page means you lose your place in the
| game.
| 2bird3 wrote:
| Nice concept! A lot of modal spam could probably reduced, very
| distracting.
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(page generated 2026-01-12 23:01 UTC)