This is beautifully designed and engaging and potentially a fun way to learn things! Amazing work.
Some things you could add to make it stickier:
1. Have a natural end where you "win" - possibly I just didn't hit this, it's the kind of game I'd play in bed in the morning as long as the play time was similar to Wordle and the other NYT games.
2. Have facts show up when you get something right! Could literally just be the opening sentence from the article and a link to the article. This extra context stimulates curiosity - I'd love to be able to have "Space physics? That doesn't sound like a real thing..." and then have the hat guy pop up and go, "You cracked it chief. Space Physics is the study of high atmosphere plasmas."
EDIT: for comparison, have a look at Metazooa - https://metazooa.com/ - which did this very well.
It is, though? I also had the same map come up about five times, showing a picture of the Parthenon and the Athenian acropolis, but it consistently insisted that these were of Orchomenos, which also had an acropolis but AFAIK is not the same; they are about 80 miles apart.
edit: it appears that Orchomenus also has an area of the city that Wikipedia refers to as the acropolis; I'm wondering if the game pulls the acropolis data from the Athenian Acropolis but then mistakenly attributes it to Orchomenus? I thought it might be because some great physics discovery was made there (given the daily challenge genre) but I haven't seen anything.
I also played the map game, and in addition to getting the same article several times I got two articles that had some of the same photos but whose locations were ~100 miles apart.
After nine rounds it suddenly ended and I was confused.
I played the Map mode and got the same page several times, and then the game ended with half my "life" left. It was really fun but I passed a lot of rounds just on memory
I've played one game of ransom. This is fun but I have some comments/suggestions.
1. Letters are sometimes barely shuffled
2. Sometimes same clue with different redacted words come one after another so you know which words are redacted
3. Sometimes (foreign names for example) the answer is not redacted due to accents. Same for similar words (complexity uncensored for "complex system"). Sometimes picture or video contains answer.
4. I guess you use some popularity metric for articles? I got Greece, ancient Greece and archaic Greece, though the topic is allegedly physics? Maybe filtering a bit more would be better
5. Before I started game I didn't know how long it is supposed to last. Apparently it's indefinite, and I lost on purpose to verify it.
6. Some feeling of progression with harder tasks would also feel nice.
Design is super cool. Still dont understand what the goal is, at least for the map i was guessing the location every single time because most of the pictures are of the location. Maybe i am misunderstanding.
Two pain points:
- No "reward" after guessing it even completing. If based on Wikipedia, give me some facts about the places! (Even if wrong imo)
- I did the physics map daily. I got the same location 4 times in a single play. Definitely need logic to prevent doing the same location to the same use in a certain time period.
As the other commenters, I liked the concept. I did the map, and got quite a few repeated answers.
I then did the ransom one, but I did quite well until I got definitely bored around round 70. I think 100 rounds are too much, at least for the daily game.
This is really cool but the execution is a bit cludgy at the moment (it looks great but the games themselves are confusing / too easily messed up). if polished up I could see it being really popular a la wordle.
I was doing locations. I got something that looked like the parthenon. Like an idiot, I clicked Rome. Wrong. Chalkida, Greece.
Next location: same pictures. OK, I picked Chalkida. Wrong. Orchomenos.
Next location: same pictures. OK, I picked Orchomenos. Correct. And the accepted range was a huge square, covering most of Greece and the surrounding Mediterranean. Chalkida would have been within it as well.
So the location seems inconsistent with the pictures and the same pictures kept showing up.
Really fun, took me over 20 articles before I realized I can just type the letters on my keyboard instead of clicking them one by one with my mouse :^).
Good bit of work. I certainly enjoyed ten minutes with it. Like other comments here, I'll say that a lot of the same things kept coming up. I got Athens and Iraq multiple times. It might be worth spending a little time to "curate" some sets of articles or even put together an LLM agent for doing so.
This is a very clever idea. I've toyed with the idea of making a multiple site mystery challenge in the past, a bit like a geo game with real world tagging and drop boxes.
Some things you could add to make it stickier:
1. Have a natural end where you "win" - possibly I just didn't hit this, it's the kind of game I'd play in bed in the morning as long as the play time was similar to Wordle and the other NYT games.
2. Have facts show up when you get something right! Could literally just be the opening sentence from the article and a link to the article. This extra context stimulates curiosity - I'd love to be able to have "Space physics? That doesn't sound like a real thing..." and then have the hat guy pop up and go, "You cracked it chief. Space Physics is the study of high atmosphere plasmas."
EDIT: for comparison, have a look at Metazooa - https://metazooa.com/ - which did this very well.
It's also not clear if there's a goal in each game. So far as I can tell it goes on forever.
Edit: both the lock and dial game modes put me into the same dial game mode; I'm going to guess it's a bug. They also seem to be for the same article.
After nine rounds it suddenly ended and I was confused.
1. Letters are sometimes barely shuffled 2. Sometimes same clue with different redacted words come one after another so you know which words are redacted 3. Sometimes (foreign names for example) the answer is not redacted due to accents. Same for similar words (complexity uncensored for "complex system"). Sometimes picture or video contains answer. 4. I guess you use some popularity metric for articles? I got Greece, ancient Greece and archaic Greece, though the topic is allegedly physics? Maybe filtering a bit more would be better 5. Before I started game I didn't know how long it is supposed to last. Apparently it's indefinite, and I lost on purpose to verify it. 6. Some feeling of progression with harder tasks would also feel nice.
Two pain points: - No "reward" after guessing it even completing. If based on Wikipedia, give me some facts about the places! (Even if wrong imo) - I did the physics map daily. I got the same location 4 times in a single play. Definitely need logic to prevent doing the same location to the same use in a certain time period.
I then did the ransom one, but I did quite well until I got definitely bored around round 70. I think 100 rounds are too much, at least for the daily game.
I'm guessing it scrapes Wikipedia for a topic and then digests it, converting it into informational cards.
I was doing locations. I got something that looked like the parthenon. Like an idiot, I clicked Rome. Wrong. Chalkida, Greece.
Next location: same pictures. OK, I picked Chalkida. Wrong. Orchomenos.
Next location: same pictures. OK, I picked Orchomenos. Correct. And the accepted range was a huge square, covering most of Greece and the surrounding Mediterranean. Chalkida would have been within it as well.
So the location seems inconsistent with the pictures and the same pictures kept showing up.
Design suggestion: The home page "START" button looks more like a logo (in the BOWLARAMA vein), my eye skipped right over it.
After my first answer, I just got ”Something went wrong…”
Never got around to it, but this is clever.
How did you design that awesome background!?
Thank you, OP.