Posts for Tag: game

NYT Digits Solver

Posted In: Game
NYT Digits game solver

You can play new daily Digits puzzles

Calculate the solution to any digits puzzle

This tool lets you view all of the potential solutions to a Digits puzzle. Enter the goal number and the five starting numbers separated by a comma like “1,2,3,4,5” and hit the “Calculate Solutions” button to see all of the possible solutions to the puzzle. The list is likely quite long so you’ll probably need to scroll through all of the solutions in the list.

There is also a checkbox that lets you remove transpositions, which are operations that occur in different orders but the same set of operations are used to achieve the final number. For example, where the first two operations appear in reverse order and then are added together in the 3rd operation to hit the target.
e.g. these two solutions are an example of a transposition.
5 + 10 = 15 15 / 3 = 5 5 * 20 = 100
vs
15 / 3 = 5 5 + 10 = 15 5 * 20 = 100

Tools
A version of the solution code is written in Python code and is used to generate the puzzles. This code is re-written in javascript so it is solved inside the browser and the visuals are made with javascript, CSS and HTML and the graphs are made using the open source Plotly javascript graphing library.

digits nytimes game solver

NY Times Digits Archive

Posted In: Fun | Game | Math
You can also play new daily Digits puzzles and try out the Digits Solver

Now play all old Engaging Data Digits puzzles plus 120 archived Digits puzzles from the New York Times

You can still play the NYT Digits Game

Missing the NYT Digits game? You can still play (or replay) the old puzzles here.

On August 8th, 2023, the New York Times ended the beta for their Digits math game and the game is no longer playable. The game ran from April 10th to August 8th and there were 120 different daily puzzles during that time.

Twitter user @Digits_Analysis had compiled a list of each of the five daily puzzles during that entire time period (600 puzzles total) and generously provided them to me. Since I already coded up a Digits replacement with daily puzzles, I figured I could adapt that code fairly easily to make a version where you could play old puzzles. The first 120 puzzles are the original NY Times puzzles and subsequent puzzles are the collection of new daily puzzles.

Rules

The rules for Digits are relatively simple just like in the NYT version. Each day’s puzzle has 5 individual puzzles to complete. Every puzzle has a target number and 6 individual starting numbers that you must use in mathematical calculations to try and create the target number. Each of the 6 numbers can only be used once but the answer to a given math calculation becomes a new number to use.

Once you finish one puzzle, you can use the tabs at the top to move to another puzzle.

Scoring

You get up to 3 stars for each puzzle:
3 stars if you match the target
2 stars if your number is within 10 of the target
1 star if your number is within 25 of the target

Other

Auto-Advance – Click on the gear to toggle on and off “auto-advance”. When enabled, the game will cue up the next puzzle if you hit the target.

Chainmode – Click on the gear to toggle on and off “chainmode”. When enabled, it will automatically highlight the answer from the previous calculation to be the first number in the new calculation.

Share – Share your Digits stars on social media using the share button, which will copy your results to your clipboard. It will share a link to the specific puzzle you are on.

# button – clicking the # button lets you see the total number of possible solutions as well as the fewest and most operations that can yield a solution. This can bring an extra element of challenge to the game. See if you can achieve the shortest solution and then try again to achieve the longest solution. Clicking on the buttons reveals one of the solutions that have the fewest and most number of operations.

Tracking your plays – Digits archive will keep track of your stars for all of 120 daily puzzles. Given that there are 120 old Digits puzzles to play, it may take folks many days, weeks or even months to go through these puzzles. One issue is that on the Safari browser on Macs and iOS devices, the data storage used to track your progress through these puzzles may be deleted if you don’t play the game for 7 days. The browser does this for privacy concerns. Just be aware that your data could be deleted by the browser if you are using Safari and don’t play at least once for 7 straight days. This shouldn’t be a problem for other browsers.

Hopefully you’ll find this enjoy playing the old NYTimes Digits math game and find it a fun and interesting way to improve your mathematical thinking. Let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions.

Tools
Python code was used to generate the puzzles and the game play and visuals were created in javascript, CSS and HTML. The New York Times Digits puzzle data was obtained from @Digits_Analysis

digits nytimes game

Digits Game NYT – A Daily Math Puzzle

Posted In: Game | Math
image of Digits NYT game from engaging data
You can now play past NYT Digits puzzles at the Digits Archive and use the Digits Solver
Press the # symbol to see the solutions.

Please share Digits with your friends, family, colleagues, math teachers, students and anyone else you think might enjoy this math puzzle game

It’s great to hear from all the folks who have taken the time to play Digits and let me know. I’m glad that so many people are enjoying it.

You can still play the NYT Digits Game

Missing the NYT Digits game? You can still play it here.

On August 8th, 2023, the New York Times ended the beta for their Digits math game and the game is no longer playable. About a week prior to that, a friend asked me to create a clone of Digits so he and his daughter could keep playing together. I had never played before but tried it out. Not surprisingly, since I like games, puzzles and math, I found it to be quite fun. I’m always looking out for interesting things to make, so I figured it would be a fun challenge. I’d previously made some variants of the popular Wordle Game: Wordguessr, Tridle and Scrabwordle.

Rules

The rules for Digits are relatively simple just like in the NYT version. Each day you are given 5 puzzles to complete. Every puzzle has a target number and 6 individual starting numbers that you must use in mathematical calculations to try and create the target number. Each of the 6 numbers can only be used once but the answer to a given math calculation becomes a new number to use.

Once you finish one puzzle, you can use the tabs at the top to move to another puzzle.

Scoring

You get up to 3 stars for each puzzle:
3 stars if you match the target
2 stars if your number is within 10 of the target
1 star if your number is within 25 of the target

Other

Auto-Advance – Click on the gear to toggle on and off “auto-advance”. When enabled, the game will cue up the next puzzle if you hit the target.

Chainmode – Click on the gear to toggle on and off “chainmode”. When enabled, it will automatically highlight the answer from the previous calculation to be the first number in the new calculation.

Share – Share your Digits stars on social media using the share button, which will copy your results to your clipboard.

# button – clicking the # button lets you see the total number of possible solutions as well as the fewest and most operations that can yield a solution. This can bring an extra element of challenge to the game. See if you can achieve the shortest solution and then try again to achieve the longest solution. Clicking on the buttons reveals one of the solutions that have the fewest and most number of operations.

Hopefully you’ll find this replacement to the NYTimes Digits math game a fun and interesting game and improve your mathematical thinking. Let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions.

Why did the New York Times discontinue Digits?

I’m guessing it wasn’t as popular as some of their other games. Wordle and the crossword puzzle are probably the most popular. And they seem to be pushing their new game Connections as a sort of replacement for Digits. But alot of folks like math games so it’s a bit of a shame that they discontinued it, especially since it’s simple to learn how to play but can be challenging to get the solution each time.

Tools
Python code was used to generate the puzzles and the game play and visuals were created in javascript, CSS and HTML.

digits nytimes game

Wordle Stats – How Hard is Today’s Wordle?

Posted In: Fun | Game

Update: Just added the ability to look at some previous puzzles (since I started downloading the data from the Wordlebot). Also, you can now view the answers of the puzzles if you click on the eye icon.

What is the distribution of guesses for the daily Wordle?

Wordle is a game of highs and lows. Sometimes your guesses are lucky and you can solve the puzzle easily and sometimes you barely get it in 6 guesses. When the latter happens, sometimes you want validation that that day’s puzzle was hard. This data viz lets you see how other NY Times Wordle players did against the day’s puzzle.

The graph shows the distribution of guesses needed to solve today’s Wordle puzzle, rounded to the nearest whole percent. It also colors the most common number of guesses to solve the puzzle in green and calculates the average number of guesses. “NS” stands for Not Solved.

Even over 1 year later, I still enjoy playing Wordle. I even made a few Wordle games myself – WordguessrTridleScrabwordle. I’ve been enjoying the Wordlebot which does a daily analysis of your game. I especially enjoy how it indicates how “lucky” your guesses were and how they eliminated possible answers until you arrive at the puzzle solution. One thing it also provides is data on the frequency of guesses that are made which provides information on the number of guesses it took to solve each puzzle.

I play in the mornings so the graph data will be updated every day at 7am Pacific Time.

Data and Tools
The data comes from playing NY Times Wordle game and using their Wordlebot. Python is used to extract the data and wrangle the data into a clean format. Visualization was done in javascript and specifically the plotly visualization library.

wordle daily guess distribution

ScrabWordle

Posted In: Fun | Game

Also try WordGuessr and Tridle


What is ScrabWordle? Wordle with a Scrabble twist

ScrabWordle is a game based on the hugely popular Wordle by Josh Wardle, where you try to solve a 5-letter puzzle. The Scrabble element of the game comes in where the point value of the target word is given based on the letter values in the game and is another helpful clue to help solve the puzzle.

I recently made WordGuessr and Tridle. So I’d already made the structure of the game and just needed to add the Scrabble elements. And it took me a little while to work out all the kinks and it also improved my CSS skills to get all the aspects of the look of the tiles correct.

How to Play ScrabWordle

If you know how to play Wordle, then the rules are the same:
1) the game reports the point value of the target word
2) just type in a guess and and press ‘Enter’, the score of your guess is updated in real time
3) the game will indicate how good your guess was. If any letter are in their correct position they will turn green, if they are correct but in the wrong place, they turn orange, and if they don’t show up in the word they turn black.
4) guess again, using the clues from the previous word
5) you can share your results with other folks or issue a challenge game
6) play all you want

The game is created using HTML, CSS and Javascript code to create interactivity and UI. Hope you enjoy it. I enjoy the extra element (word point values) to help me guess the word. Let me know in the comments how you like the new game play and if the difficulty levels are appropriate.

scrabwordle scrabble wordle

Tridle – a triple Wordle game

Posted In: Fun
Tridle game

Over 5 Million games played! (December 2022).

Try my clone of the NYTimes game Digits


What is Tridle? Triple Wordle

Tridle is a game based on the hugely popular Wordle by Josh Wardle, where you try to solve three puzzles (Triple Wordle) at the same time. It is also modeled after Dordle and Quordle, but a little different (3 instead of 2 or 4!)

Shortly after I started playing Wordle in early January, I wanted to play more games so I decided to make a Wordle game so I could play as often as I wanted. I made WordGuessr in a day or so. It ended up being fairly popular and lots of people still play.

Recently, I started playing Dordle (where you solve two puzzles simultaneously), which adds an extra layer of challenge onto the Wordle game. I thought that a triple Wordle game would be a fun game to code up and since I’d already made the structure of the single game, how hard could making 3 be. Well, it took me another day or so to work out all the kinks and it was also stretched my CSS skills to get all the look correct with all the various permutations of the game and generating three boards simultaneously.

If you know how to play Wordle, then the rules are the same:
1) just type in a guess and and press ‘Enter’.
2) the game will indicate how good your guess was for each puzzle separately. If any letter are in their correct position they will turn green, if they are correct but in the wrong place, they turn orange, and if they don’t show up in the word they turn black.
3) guess again, using the clues from the previous word
4) repeat until you get each of the words correct or fail to figure them all out after 8 tries.
5) you can share your results with other folks
6) play all you want

The game is created using HTML, CSS and Javascript code to create interactivity and UI.

tridle triple wordle