[beepy]

It ought to do a better job of explaining that there are specific words it's looking for. Originally I did explore the game you thought that this game was — create any 3 words using all the loose tiles — but the problem is, there are around 12K five-letter words in standard word game play. My game has an imperfect list of less than 33% of these that can be recognized by most people. It would be too easy to guess an acceptable word, only to have the remaining words technically legal, but not among the remaining guessable words, and worse, possibly offensive. If I limit it to only the guessable words, then for many people, words they reasonably expected to be accepted would be inexplicably rejected.

[yunwal]

Requirements imo, should be 1) All used words are guessable 2) There are no possible alternate solutions with unguessable words

I haven't done the math, but I suspect there are plenty of solutions like this, you'll just have to calculate them.

[jimmydorry]

It would probably make the difficulty guide inaccurate, unless you take the lowest possible difficulty as the guide where ever there is more than one solution.

[thaumasiotes]

> My game has an imperfect list of less than 33% of these that can be recognized by most people. It would be too easy to guess an acceptable word, only to have the remaining words technically legal, but not among the remaining guessable words, and worse, possibly offensive.

Given the restriction that you can only guess "words", you need to improve the wordlist anyway. I had "denty" rejected as a guess, which was not a good look when "folky" turned out to be an official answer.

My other suggestion would be to revise the keyboard input - it's much easier to type the entire word I want to guess than to look at which letters are missing and only type those.

And while it's not a suggestion, I would note that your "cruelly challenging" difficulty level is noticeably easier than the levels that are supposed to be below it, because it provides no clues. This makes it much easier to determine which letters go in which word.