DEV Community: BY L

Building a Browser-Local Reverse Wordle Game

BY L — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:57:20 +0000

Most word games reward a guess that gets closer to the answer. I wanted to explore the opposite constraint: what if solving too early is the mistake?

That idea became Dont Wordle, a small browser-local reverse Wordle puzzle. The goal is not to guess the hidden word as quickly as possible. Each row must remain a legal guess while the player keeps enough options open to finish the board.

The interesting constraint

The game has three pieces of state that matter:

the current board and its legal guesses
the remaining candidate paths
the player’s saved progress for the daily challenge

Keeping that state in the browser makes the core loop fast and private. A player can open the page, play without an account, undo a move, and return later without a server session.

The design also changes the feedback loop. In a normal Wordle-style game, green letters feel like progress. In a reverse puzzle, too much information can close the remaining paths. The useful question after every row is: “Did this guess preserve a route to the end?”

Small UX details carry the game

A reverse rule is easy to explain but easy to misunderstand in play, so the interface needs to make the constraint visible. I added a legal-guess counter, an undo action, a daily challenge state, and clear feedback when a move would make the board unsolvable.

Those details are more important than adding a large feature list. The player should be able to understand why a guess failed and try another line immediately.

Why browser-local was a good fit

This kind of game does not need an account system for its first version. Local persistence keeps the product lightweight, avoids collecting unnecessary player data, and makes the daily loop work on a phone or a desktop browser.

The result is available as Dont Wordle, a free reverse word puzzle you can try directly in the browser.

The broader lesson for small web games is that a single changed rule can create a different strategy space. The engineering challenge is then to make that rule legible through state, feedback, and a very short path from opening the page to making the first move.

Using HSB sliders to make a playful color-memory game

BY L — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:21:18 +0000

I built Toon Tone, a free cartoon color guessing game for practicing color memory in a lightweight browser experience. The game uses HSB sliders so hue, saturation, and brightness are easy to reason about while matching a character color.

The project is intentionally small and shareable: it includes daily prompts, instant feedback, and shareable scores without requiring an account.

Play Toon Tone

I would love feedback on the interaction design and on whether HSB controls feel more intuitive than RGB inputs for this kind of warm-up game.

Designing a Browser-Local Eight-Board Word Puzzle

BY L — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:06:47 +0000

Why an eight-board puzzle needs a different rhythm

Most five-letter word games ask you to optimize one board. An eight-board variant turns every guess into a small information-sharing system: the same word is tested against eight answers, and the feedback arrives in parallel. That changes the best strategy from “find the answer” to “reduce uncertainty across the grid.”

Octordle Pro is a free browser-local implementation of that format. It offers Daily and Unlimited modes, keeps progress and statistics locally, and includes shareable challenge links. The product is useful as a small example of how a web game can stay interactive without requiring an account or a paid API.

The data problem is the game

Each board can be represented as a pattern, a set of excluded letters, and a set of misplaced letters. A strong opening word maximizes coverage across those sets. Once one board becomes constrained, the next guess should be chosen by its expected value for the other seven, not just by how close it looks on the first board.

That creates three practical rules:

Start with distinct, common letters so the first result teaches you something on many boards.
Keep confirmed and excluded letters separate; a yellow letter is evidence about position, not permission to reuse it anywhere.
Use a probe guess when it can eliminate several candidate families at once, even if it is unlikely to solve a board immediately.

Why browser-local matters

A browser-local game can keep statistics and preferences in local storage, load quickly, and avoid sending a player's guesses to a server. The trade-off is that progress is device-specific, so a clear shareable challenge URL is useful when you want to compare a round with someone else.

The most satisfying rounds come from treating the eight boards as one system. Broad coverage early, careful bookkeeping in the middle, and focused cleanup at the end make a large grid feel manageable.