DEV Community: Jake Mittal

What Building a Wordle-Style Game Taught Me About Unlimited Modes, Streaks, and Accessibility

Jake Mittal — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 13:12:15 +0000

If you’ve ever built a small browser game, you know the feature list looks simple until you actually start. Grid, keyboard, validation, feedback colours. Done, right?

Not quite. The interesting decisions come later, and a good example is unlimited play. I’ve been looking closely at how Canuckle Unlimited handles it. It’s a Canadian-themed Wordle-style game where a new five-letter word loads right after each round. Its design choices are worth a look if you’re building anything similar.

Daily mode and unlimited mode are really a pacing decision

The mechanics are identical: six guesses, three tile states. What differs is the session model. A daily puzzle is a shared, time-boxed event, and unlimited play is a loop. Once you remove the midnight reset, the product question changes from “how do I bring people back tomorrow?” to “what makes the next round feel worth playing?”

Streaks give unlimited play stakes

Without a daily limit, you risk losing tension. Streak tracking solves that: your win streak and guess distribution carry across rounds, so there’s always something to protect. A failed round resets the streak, which keeps each puzzle meaningful even when puzzles are endless.

Your word list is your product

Most clones share the same general dictionary and differ only in styling. Curating a themed list is where a game can actually stand apart. A Canadian list includes words like TOQUE, HOSER, and KEENER, so players can’t lean on generic pattern recognition. If you build a themed game, curation is the feature.

Post-round content closes the loop

Each round ends with a short fun fact tied to the answer. From a design standpoint, that gives losing a payoff too: you didn’t solve it, but you learned something. It also gives players a natural moment to hit “Play Again.”

Accessibility isn’t optional

Colour-coded feedback is a known problem for colourblind players. The game ships a light theme and a high-contrast mode that swaps its default palette for orange and blue. If your core feedback relies on colour alone, plan for this from the start.

Zero friction wins

No account, no download, runs in the browser. For a casual game, every extra step before the first guess costs you players.

Takeaways for your own project

Treat unlimited mode as a loop design problem, not just a toggle.
Use streaks and stats to restore the tension that removing the daily limit takes away.
Invest in a distinctive content set instead of another generic dictionary.
Build accessibility modes in early.

If you want to see these ideas in practice, play a few rounds and pay attention to what happens between puzzles. That’s where most of the design lives.

Building a Waffle-style swap puzzle with a Canadian word list

Jake Mittal — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 09:11:46 +0000

I run a small Canadian word game site, and a few months ago I started getting requests for a grid version. Not another single-word guesser, but the waffle format, where you swap tiles around a board until every row and column spells something.

It’s live now as Canuckle Waffle, and building it turned out to be a different problem from the original game. Here’s what I ran into.

The board is smaller than it looks

A waffle grid looks like 25 cells, but it’s really 21. Three words run across (rows 0, 2, 4) and three run down (columns 0, 2, 4), and the four cells in the middle gaps (1,1), (1,3), (3,1), (3,3) don’t exist.

Six words with five letters each would be 30 letters, but 9 of them are shared at the crossings, so you get 21 unique tiles. That sharing is what makes the puzzle work and also what makes generating it annoying.

const CELLS = [];
for (let r = 0; r < 5; r++) {
  for (let c = 0; c < 5; c++) {
    const isGap = r % 2 === 1 && c % 2 === 1;
    if (!isGap) CELLS.push([r, c]);
  }
}
// CELLS.length === 21

Finding six words that actually fit

Picking six words isn’t hard. Picking six that agree on their crossing letters is. Each of the 9 intersections has to be a letter that works in both words, so you can’t just draw from a list at random.

With a general English dictionary there’s plenty of room. With a Canadian-themed list (provinces, slang, wildlife, food) it gets tight fast. There are only so many five-letter words that are both clearly Canadian and share the right letters at positions 1, 3 and 5 of each other.

My fix was to let the occasional plain English word in as a connector. A grid with five Canadian words and one filler is better than no grid at all. I mention it on the page too, since otherwise players wonder why one word looks out of place.

Scrambling without making it unsolvable

The easy way to scramble is to shuffle all 21 tiles randomly. The problem is that you then have no idea how many swaps the solution needs, and you want to tell the player a fair move limit.

So go the other way: start from the solved grid and apply a fixed number of random swaps.

function scramble(grid, swaps = 10) {
  const g = grid.slice();
  for (let i = 0; i < swaps; i++) {
    const a = randIndex(g.length);
    let b = randIndex(g.length);
    while (b === a) b = randIndex(g.length);
    [g[a], g[b]] = [g[b], g[a]];
  }
  return g;
}

Since you built the puzzle by working backwards, you know a solution exists within that many swaps. The player gets a few extra moves on top as a buffer, and unused moves turn into the score.

The catch is that random swaps can undo each other or move a tile that was already correct, so the real minimum can be lower than the number you applied. I also lock any tile that lands back in its right spot so the player starts with a few anchors.

Duplicate letters will bite you

Grids with repeated letters (two E’s, two O’s) break the naive version of the check. If you color tiles by comparing each one to the answer at the same index, a duplicate letter can show as wrong even though swapping it with its twin would make no difference.

You need to treat duplicates as interchangeable when deciding what’s solved, and compare words, not individual tiles, when checking for a win.

Input

Click-to-swap was the easy part. Drag and drop was worse, mostly because touch events on mobile fight with page scrolling. I ended up supporting both, since some people tap two tiles and some people drag, and neither group wanted to switch.

If you’ve built something like this and handled the duplicate-letter case more cleanly, I’d like to see how you did it.

What I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Learned to Code at 25

Jake Mittal — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:47:09 +0000

I didn't grow up dreaming of being a developer. At 25, I had two degrees, zero job offers, and a growing suspicion that the plan I'd spent years building wasn't going to work.

I'm writing this for anyone in the DEV community who came to programming late, sideways, or out of necessity rather than childhood passion — because I think there are more of us than the "I wrote my first line of code at age 8" stories would suggest.

The trap I didn't see coming

Before I get to the code part, I have to talk about the thing that almost stopped me from getting there.

I'd worked hard for two degrees. As an immigrant in the US, that effort felt even heavier — it wasn't just time, it was a bet on a whole life plan. So when those degrees didn't open the doors I expected, my instinct wasn't to change direction. It was to push harder in the same direction. Apply to more jobs. Wait longer. Justify the investment.

That's the sunk cost fallacy, and it's sneaky because it disguises itself as loyalty and grit.

The sentence that changed my direction

A friend said something to me that cut through all of it:

"In life, we must choose our regrets: 6 years pursuing the wrong degrees, or 40 years in the wrong career. You decide."

That's when I stopped treating my degrees as a debt I had to repay with my career and started treating them as sunk cost — already spent, not refundable by staying miserable.

What actually learning to code looked like

No bootcamp scholarship, no CS background, no safety net. Just me, some free resources, and a lot of confusion in the beginning that I assumed meant I wasn't cut out for it (I was wrong — that confusion is just what learning looks like).

A few things that helped, if you're earlier in this than I was:

I stopped comparing my week 1 to someone else's year 3
I built small, embarrassing projects instead of waiting to feel "ready"
I treated every error message as information, not judgment
I accepted that starting later meant catching up on syntax, not on capability

If you're reading this wondering if it's too late

It's not. Compare your regrets the way my friend made me compare mine. A few years of feeling behind is temporary. Decades in the wrong path is not.

The best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is now.

How to Solve CANUCKLE: A Beginner's Guide to Cracking the Puzzle

Jake Mittal — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 13:28:47 +0000

If you've just discovered CANUCKLE, Canada's own spin on the daily word puzzle craze, you're in for a fun challenge. It plays a lot like other popular word games, but with a maple-flavoured twist — think Canadian slang, place names, and pop culture sprinkled into the answers. If you're stuck more often than not, a few smart strategies and the occasional peek at Canuckle hints can turn frustration into satisfaction.

Start With a Strong Opening Word

Your first guess sets the tone for the whole puzzle. Choose a word with common vowels and frequently used consonants — something like ROAST, ADIEU, or CANOE (fitting, given the theme). Avoid repeating letters in your opener, since your goal here is to gather as much information as possible, not to guess correctly on turn one.

Read the Colour Clues Carefully

Like most Wordle-style games, CANUCKLE gives you colour feedback after every guess:

Green means the letter is correct and in the right spot.
Yellow means the letter belongs in the word, but not there.
Grey means the letter isn't in the word at all.

Take a moment after each guess to actually study the pattern instead of rushing to your next word. This is where most players lose easy wins.

Think Canadian

CANUCKLE draws its word bank from Canadian culture — hockey terms, weather-related words, provinces, wildlife, and homegrown slang all show up regularly. If you're down to a few possible letters and stuck, try thinking through words tied to Canadian life: TOQUE, MOOSE, PARKA, or BEAVER-adjacent terms often make appearances. This context clue alone can knock out several guesses.

Use Process of Elimination

By your third or fourth guess, you should have a good mix of confirmed and eliminated letters. Use this to narrow the field methodically:

List out every letter you know is in the word.
Cross off every letter you know isn't.
Try test words that use your confirmed letters in new positions.

This structured approach beats guessing randomly, especially in the later rounds when you only have one or two tries left.

Don't Be Afraid to Ask for a Nudge

Even seasoned puzzle solvers get stuck sometimes, and that's completely normal. If you've exhausted your logic and still can't land the word, there's no shame in checking a source for Canuckle help to see today's answer or a helpful hint before your streak breaks. It's a great way to keep your daily habit alive without the frustration of losing to a tricky Canadianism.

Final Thoughts

CANUCKLE rewards a mix of vocabulary, logic, and a bit of Canadian trivia knowledge. Start strong, read your clues carefully, think local, and don't hesitate to get a hint when you need one. Happy solving!

Why Canadians (and Everyone Else) Are Obsessed With This WORDLE Spin-Off

Jake Mittal — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:04:51 +0000

Canuckle — Canadian Wordle isn't trying to reinvent the word-guessing genre. It's doing something smarter: taking a format the whole world already loves and filling it with words that actually mean something to a specific culture. The result is a daily puzzle that feels less like a copy of Wordle and more like a love letter to Canada.

The Same Rules, A Completely Different Feeling

Six guesses. Five letters. Green for correct placement, yellow for right letter wrong spot, grey for nope. If you've played Wordle even once, you already know how to play Canuckle. What you don't know — yet — is the vocabulary waiting for you.

Instead of generic dictionary words, every answer draws from Canadian slang, geography, wildlife, food, and history. Think hockey terms, provincial capitals, Indigenous place names, and the kind of everyday words that only make sense if you've spent real time north of the border. Suddenly a familiar game mechanic feels brand new, because you can't lean on muscle memory from playing the original — you have to actually think like a local.

A Puzzle That Doubles as a Culture Lesson

Canada rarely gets to define itself on its own terms in global pop culture. Canuckle flips that. For Canadian players, it's validating — finally a puzzle built around the words they grew up with instead of imported ones. For everyone else, it's an accidental crash course: you'll walk away knowing a few new pieces of Canadian geography or slang without ever feeling like you sat through a lesson.

Unlimited Mode Is the Real Unlock

Daily puzzles are fun, but they end fast. That's where the unlimited mode changes the experience entirely. Instead of solving one puzzle and waiting 24 hours, you can keep playing back-to-back — great for long commutes, classroom use, or just those evenings when one puzzle isn't enough. Teachers looking for a low-effort way to sneak vocabulary and geography practice into a lesson plan will find this mode especially useful.

Who's Actually Playing

The audience is wider than you'd guess: Canadians who want a game that reflects home, newcomers learning the culture and language at the same time, students, trivia lovers, and burned-out Wordle players hunting for something with fresh word lists and a bit more personality.

Getting Started Takes Seconds

No sign-up, no download, no learning curve. Just open it in a browser — desktop or mobile — and start guessing. If you're new to the format, ease in with the daily puzzle first, then move to unlimited mode once it clicks.

It's simple on the surface and surprisingly sticky once the Canadian vocabulary starts throwing you curveballs — which is exactly the point.

Give Canuckle — Canadian Wordle a try and see how well you actually know the Great White North.