from Hacker News

I had a lot of fun playing an Android app where you have to find words in a random grid of letters (like Boggle). Challenge for me was to find the longest word... and seeing which I missed was a way to learn new words.

I've iterated on the concept, and made a game you can play in the browser, Gridogram: instead of being random, for each day a grid of letters is created from a quote or phrase of some sort that relates to the day.

For example, here's a grid that contains the Y Combinator motto [1]:

  E G I W
  L H N A
  P T M K
  S O E P

Finding words: connect horizontally, vertically or diagonally adjacent letters, without using the same letter twice.

An interesting challenge on the development side is figuring out whether a quote will fit in a grid, and creating it in a reasonable amount of time. A 5x5 grid is the biggest one I've made, and that has over 100 billion possible paths along which to fit the words. Sometimes the search never gets there, still working on it, and planning to write up the more interesting parts once I've fully wrapped my head around them.

Grateful to hear any thoughts on the game!

[1] "Make something people want"