I'm still having a lot of fun releasing daily puzzles for my game Tiled Words: https://tiledwords.com

It just won an award! It was awarded Players' Choice out of 700 daily web games at the Playlin awards: https://playlin.io/news/announcing-the-2025-playlin-awards-w...

Right now around 3,500 people play every day which kind of blows my mind!

It's free, web-based, and responsive. It was inspired by board games and crosswords.

I've been troubleshooting some iOS performance issues, working on user accounts, and getting ready to launch player-submitted puzzles. It's slow going though because I have limited free time and making the puzzles is time consuming!

Here's an article with more info about the award: https://cogconnected.com/2026/03/tiled-words-crowned-the-pla...

I think I am getting close to a 100 day streak. Thanks!

Awesome, thanks for playing!!

My wife and I just finished our morning Tiled Words and Bracket City. It's become part of our morning routine. Thanks for it, it's a lot of fun!

That’s awesome, thanks!

Bracket City is great! Definitely one of my favorites

I don't play every day, but I've been a big fan of Tiled and showed it to a number of other folks.

Thank you so much for keeping it going!

Thanks for playing and sharing!

That's a lot of fun, good work.

Thanks!

How did you go from 0 users to 3,500? Genuinely curious how people get their games off the ground.

It's been a gradual process over the last 5.5 months. Here are some of the things that worked for me:

- I applied to showcase the game at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game Squad. They accepted me so I was able to showcase it at the expo for a day. This got me some players right off the bat

- I shared it on HN, Reddit, Mastodon, etc.

- The website Thinky Games wrote an article about it

- The YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic shared it which got a lot of new players. More recently a couple of other YouTubers (Timotab and Stro Solves) have been posting videos regularly

- I link to it from my blog, and this unrelated rant went semi-viral in web dev circles: https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/shadcn-radio-button/

- Winning the award gave me more visibility and players

I've also tried using things like Instagram and Discord but haven't had much luck there. I don't really get how those platforms work.

To be honest I'm not great at marketing. I've just been experimenting and seeing what works.

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I would say the most important thing is the game itself:

- I've worked hard to gather feedback and incorporate it into the gameplay.

- I focus on keeping the puzzles fresh and striking the right difficulty level. (Challenging but something most people can do in 10 minutes.)

- I built a sharing feature that ~300 or so people use a day

I think all my marketing would have been useless if people didn't like the game and want to play again and share it with their friends.

I remember seeing this! It was cool, and I will remember to play it more.

Re creating puzzles, does this mean you have to manually do them one per day? Is there a way to automate them ahead of time (as in have an app generate a bunch of puzzles you can pick from or tweak)?

This is something I’ve been grappling with.

I’ve automated parts of the process. Once I have the words and clues I can autogenerate crosswords and pick the best one.

I’m hesitant to automate the creation of the theme, words, and clues though. I worry that the quality would go down but there may be some opportunities to speed up brainstorming there. I’ve been noodling on this.

Huh as someone who has a career doing both design and engineering I disagree with this take.

I think both skills can be learned. I also think that people have intrinsic talents that make them better or worse at those skills.

Put another way, anyone can learn to code but some people will never be great at it while others have a natural talent. Same for design.

I’m curious why you think otherwise. What’s the difference in your mind?

I’m kinda getting off topic here but anecdotally: I’ve tried to get so many of my friends to learn programming. I love it, and I think a lot of em would love it too. But they hit a hard wall with the patience needed to self learn.

Like the moment something doesn’t happen like the tutorial said (error message saying “idk what python is, you mean python3?”), they just give up completely instead of googling it. I really feel like the venn diagram of “people who can code” and “people who can google errors they don’t understand for a couple hours” is nearly a perfect circle.

LLMs can smooth out those little tediums, so maybe more people really will be able to learn programming now. But then again if you don’t have the patience to trudge through the annoying parts, will you have the patience to be confused and struggle, instead of letting Claude do the hard stuff for you? I’ll be interested to see what future self-taught devs look like!

Your friends struggle with learning programming because they don't care enough about learning it. You're the only one that cares.

Same can be said for any skill.

Threads like this bother me a bit because it makes programmers seem so smug, like they are this gifted class that is able to wizard the machine where mere mortals cannot.

Its intellectual elitism.

Regardless of that. I do think it's true that not anyone can learn it.

But the "elitism" is becoming something that is less and less relevant because people are less needing to learn it anymore thanks AI.

What I have observed is, if you don't know what the issue is, llm would usually suggest something that is unnecessarily complex and not ideal.

It might work but the moment something fails, llm suggest hacks instead of solution.

Hard agree here. I think the best predictor of whether someone will be good, eventually, at something is “do they love it”. If they do then chances are they will spend lots of focused time practicing and actively seeking out ways to get better.

Maybe that love, or at least liking something, comes from inherent talent to some degree but all the talent in the world won’t help you if you don’t put in the time.

Maybe you can learn to be mediocre or good enough designer or similarly good enough or mediocre engineer. But I don't think you can actually learn to be a great designer or great engineer - it just takes a different set of skills and evolutionary and genetic material which isn't available to all the people. Some people are simply not good enough in logical and abstract reasoning, math, and similar range of skills which are essential for becoming a good engineer. Similarly someone who is a good engineer doesn't and likely can't have skills required to become a good designer, it just takes a brain which is hardwired and developed differently.

As someone who considers themselves a good engineer and a good designer (and does both professionally) I hope that last bit isn’t true

Sure, this is why I said likely. If you are good in both then I believe this isn't something commonly found in people.

Easy. I met people who tried really hard to learn how to code and failed.

Design on the other hand especially modern design is easy. It's just text placement, geometric shapes and proper colors that synergize. This isn't like anatomical drawings or oil paintings. It's not just easy, it's obviously easy. What needs to be learned is how to use the tools and do it with speed which does take time and training, but again this is not rocket science, a lot of what looks "good" and "modern" is intuitive and obvious. And modern design is just easy to draw.

I mean look at hacker news. It's pretty clean. I like the aesthetic. I bet a "designer" didn't even touch it.

This shows a deep misunderstanding of what design is.

What you’ve described is “visual design” which is a subset of the design field.

There are many sub-specialties, but at its core design is about problem-solving, communication, and empathy.

There are a lot of bad designers who are great at making things pretty.

A good designer spends more time researching, understanding the problem space, interviewing users, brainstorming, etc., than pushing pixels around.

The context of this thread is visual design for websites. Not design for off topic bullshit like furniture.

Also I agree with a lot of what you said. The only difference is I feel anyone can do it. The qualities you attributed to a good designer are trivial to learn. Make no mistake it takes time and effort to do these things and many companies neeed a specialized role where someone is only doing this thing…

But anyone can do it and learn it. And not anyone can learn how to program.

Thanks!

Why are those the only two options?

Most of America's recent wars have been unjustified.

I think it's very reasonable to not want your products or work going towards making it easier for the US military wage unjustified wars.

I also think it would be reasonable to change your stance on that if America entered a war that you felt was justified.

(For example, I don't want to work for the military, but if we were being invaded I would consider it.)

Saying the military can't use your tool _today_ doesn't prevent you from changing your mind _tomorrow._

This looks lovely! I've been meaning to do a better job of calling friends and family. I'll try it out!

Thank you so much for the kind words! I’m glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks! I’m glad you like it.

It’s funny: I didn’t originally plan to make a daily game (or a word game for that matter.) But after prototyping a few different game concepts this was the game and format that worked best! So here I am with a daily word game haha

I’ve shared this a few times but I’m still having a blast building my game Tiled Words: https://tiledwords.com

It’s a daily word puzzle inspired by board games like Patchwork and My City.

You rotate and rearrange tiles to find clues and rebuild a broken crossword.

Right now I’ve got about 3,000 daily players and have had a few acquisition offers.

It’s been a ton of fun to build! My wife and I build the puzzles together every day. There are over 110 puzzles now so there’s a big backlog if you enjoy it.

I’m working on user accounts, hosting user puzzles, bug fixes and better puzzle building tools!

I’m happy to answer any questions

Can you share some examples?