t. tripletPLAYTEST / ALPHA 02

All three letters. Any order. Anywhere. At least five letters.

ALPHA 02

A word hunt, not a checklist.

The three letters can now appear anywhere, in any order. Every answer needs at least five letters. Each round stands alone; when a round has two conditions, both apply to the same word.

  1. Real combinations. Categories meet letter patterns, and patterns combine with transformations. Most suggested rounds have two conditions.
  2. A broad dictionary. Word legality uses 172,823 ENABLE entries. The rules are checked against the full dictionary before selection.
  3. A familiar way through. Every rule has at least two familiar answer families and three recognizable families. Related forms are grouped with a stemmer; this is an approximation, not perfect linguistic analysis.
  4. Category boundaries are explicit. This alpha uses fixed, edited category lists plus verified noun inflections. The lists are not exhaustive. Report a missing category answer through “Dispute this check”.
  5. Hints without a countdown. The first hint gives an approach. The second gives a first letter and length. Revealing an answer or skipping does not count as solving it. Hinted solves are recorded separately.
  6. Harder through the week. Five estimated difficulty steps each day, two Monday–Sunday ramps. Sunday still has familiar solutions. No real player solve rates are claimed yet.
Why the evidence changed: answer counts alone can confuse obscurity with challenge. This version also considers common-answer shortcuts, pattern complexity, word families, overlap and variety. The displayed design scores are uncalibrated; your timed attempts and fun ratings are the test.

Streak preview: the results show whether a run qualifies at 2/5 or 3/5 and whether all five were solved. Hints still count as solves. Daily calendar streaks are not implemented in this review prototype.

Sources: ENABLE, wordfreq and Princeton WordNet. Word-frequency estimates are design aids, not knowledge tests.
YOUR INDIVIDUAL PLAYTEST

Share what happened.

Includes rule decisions, fun and difficulty ratings, chosen fives, attempted words, hints, active solving time, outcomes, disputes and comments. There is no upload or shared database.

JSON preserves every attempt and run. CSV has one row per rule and summarizes play results. Feedback from alpha 01 is kept separate.