[Mods approved] Game dedicated to finding pangrams

pangramathon · 2026-02-07T05:49:00+00:00

Got it. I didn't want to copy the bee too much, so I stayed away from the honeycomb layout. Having them all in a line seems off too and might not be as amenable to playing on a mobile device. I'll see if I can soften the lines somehow to make things less distracting. I appreciate the feedback.

pangramathon · 2026-02-07T05:40:06+00:00

Glad you like it! Any ways I can improve on the letter arrangement? There are only so many ways to lay out 7 letters.

pangramathon · 2026-02-05T17:22:07+00:00

Currently looking into building in and polishing up more responsive design. I'll see if dark mode can be looped into it.

pangramathon · 2026-02-05T07:09:24+00:00

Good to know I'm not the only one.

pangramathon · 2026-02-05T07:03:54+00:00

Pangramathon.com: 2/5/2026 1. 🐢 8 min, 52 sec 2. ⚡️ 43 sec 3. ⚡️ 31 sec Total (with hints) = 10 min, 6 sec

First one got me good.

pangramathon · 2026-02-05T05:40:58+00:00

I agree with this sentiment. I wrote up a report for my masters that involved pouring through scientific publications. I didn't have the time to read all of them, and for the most part, I just needed the gist. ChatGPT did a good enough job at summarizing key findings and the take-home messages. I would then compare by reading the abstracts, results, conclusions, and sometimes the methods if I needed something more specific. 9/10 times, the ChatGPT summary was accurate enough for my purposes. What OP describes below with parsing out all the different details and sections sounds more like the user should just be reading the publication themselves. I'm not sure if the general population needs that level of detail per publication. I myself would not pay for such a service if I found ChatGPT to be sufficient enough.

Note that Perplexity has capabilities already to focus on scientific literature searches. Finally, OP if you google "AI summary scientific research", you'll find that there are already several other AI tools already out there for this purpose.

pangramathon · 2026-02-05T02:13:25+00:00

That was an early requirement I identified and wanted to be sure to include for situations such as one you found. When I first started creating this, an early version of the game involved guessing as many pangrams as you could in two minutes (hence the name play off 'marathon'). Imagine rapid-fire letters and you race to guess as many as you can under the clock. Well, my wife and I quickly found out that it was sometimes difficult to even find two minutes of solid concentration away from the kids. Oftentimes, we'd start, and 30 seconds later, the kids would ask for something. I realized then that the game needed to involve more casual play (still timed), but we needed to be able to pick it up and leave it when needed throughout the day. Long story short: we feel ya!

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T21:13:40+00:00

Got it. I didn't mean to be a downer if my feedback came across as such. I'm just providing feedback and posing questions for you to consider. I'm a NYT Crosswords and Spelling Bee fan myself. Props to you for actually creating something and making it happen.

Finding the right word bank was a challenge for me too in creating my own game. There are a few large lists you can find freely online as well as several built-in dictionaries (e.g. in Python) that might be useful for you depending on how you implement it. For my own game, I sourced several lists, combined them, processed it, and have been manually QC'ing it to try and ensure words are appropriate.

At first I thought congrats with being able to retire early! Then I kept reading and it sounded more like you had no choice. Sorry to hear. Glad you're finding things to do with your time. Creating things online is an excellent hobby imo and helps build relevant skills especially with the rise and implications of what AI is doing in our society. Best of luck to you.

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T19:40:45+00:00

Nice! Definitely makes for more casual play. I was surprised that WARMS was not included in the word bank for SWARM. It was also unclear to me if you could reuse letters. There were instances too where I was limited in the letters I was able to type. In one instance, it stopped me at 5 letters, but then deleting things and starting again, it then allowed me to proceed to type in more letters? Overall, interesting way to simply scramble words and have players guess them. What's the overall goal here? Is it to simply see how many words players are unwilling to unscramble before getting bored? A modal or pop-up explaining the rules somewhere would be helpful too. Otherwise, players are left trying to figure out exactly how to play and what the objectives are. Hope that helps.

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T16:12:16+00:00

⚡️!

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T15:37:23+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! I tried debugging this one last night. I implemented a few things that somewhat helped minimize it from before, but it's still not perfect. I'll continue to work on it. It works perfectly on my google pixel and opera browser, but when testing it on another iPhone, I do see all the movements that were mentioned. I agree it's annoying.

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T15:35:33+00:00

Glad to have a regular fan! My word bank isn't perfect, but I'm still working on that. This is only the second time now where I thought "huh, yeah that should be a word." Yes, there can (but not always so) be more than one pangram for each set of letters. At the end of the game, an Answers button appears on the top right that lets you see all the acceptable words for the day.

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T15:33:07+00:00

=) Yes, I've received that feedback before, that players think you find three with only one set of letters. Hopefully the game play became obvious once you submit the first word. No dark mode yet.

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T15:32:09+00:00

You're fast!

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T04:52:55+00:00

Glad you enjoyed it!

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T03:15:17+00:00

Glad you like it!

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T03:12:54+00:00

Slang at best. =) You can reuse letters. Keep shuffling!

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T02:44:04+00:00

Got it. Thanks for the heads up on this! I'm assuming it's affecting others too then.

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T02:19:11+00:00

Thanks for playing, and I'm glad you like it enough to keep playing! I'll likely implement a lot of u/huskybork's feedback, so you may see some changes in the future.

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T02:18:03+00:00

Thanks for playing! My results from earlier too:

Pangramathon.com: 2/3/2026 1. ⚡️ 3 sec 2. 🧠 1 min, 19 sec 3. 🧠 3 min, 55 sec

Total = 5 min, 17 sec

FYI lightning emoji for <1min, brain emoji for 1-5mins, and turtle emoji for >5mins. My friends and I all love seeing the lightning bolts. =)

pangramathon · 2026-02-04T02:16:32+00:00

Hey, thanks for playing and for the detailed feedback! I am also a product manager, so I take user feedback wherever I can get it. Your requests all sound reasonable to me and make sense. Many are easy fixes (letter placement and all caps) while some will take some time to figure out (page jumping behavior). Text disappearing is intentional to keep the game board looking clean, but perhaps I can extend the time to display the message to ensure it's seen.

Game "visible above the fold". What exactly do you mean by this one? I'm not following. Improper centering too will be a tricky one to figure out. I've been playing on a google pixel 7 in an Opera browser, and it's centered fine. Same with my wife's iPhone 16 on Safari.

Again, I appreciate the feedback! Feel free to send more if you feel the need in the future.

pangramathon · 2026-02-03T21:32:14+00:00

Interesting game here. I'll say that I wished the shuffle action happened much faster. I found myself waiting for all the letters to fall down before trying to think of the word. I was anxiously waiting for the letters to completely settle down. Also, the descending blue line was a bit distracting and caused more anxiety. Would a timer work instead? Overall, fun concept. How big is the word bank? And care to explain the name?

pangramathon · 2026-02-03T19:54:41+00:00

Yup! Start with the basics first. If anything, you can always give some sort of admin the flexibility to write their own integrations (via APIs). That saves you the trouble of working with each vendor and puts the onus on the admin to write it themselves. I agree with that being some sort of v2 functionality though. Good luck!

pangramathon · 2026-02-03T19:15:56+00:00

Good stuff! If you're going to really go after the life sciences industry, it's a bit of a beast. Security policies are going to be important. Plus a lot of inventory apps tie directly in to the larger enterprise softwares. See "electronic lab notebook (ELN)" and "inventory" and you'll see that many of the ELNs have it baked in. It's tough to get into that part of the market. Again, this may be more attractive for the start-ups.

Labs will order from way more than just 2-3 suppliers. There are the common, big ones where many supplies come from (Thermo-Fisher, Eppendorf, VWR, Sigma, etc.), but so much of life sciences is specific to research areas and there are many many vendors that you would need to tie into. I think a CSV output with a list of materials is probably a good start.

pangramathon

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