🃏 Classic1894Unknown, Victorian parlour gameEASY

Hangman rebuild deck

EASY

Nothing is hard, and whether it is any good is decided entirely by a word list somebody curated by hand.

You will get essentially the whole thing.

The code is a Tuesday evening and the word list is the actual product. Ask an agent to include one and you will get forty words, half of them nine letters long, at least one misspelled, and the game will be unplayable for reasons you will misdiagnose as difficulty tuning. Pull a frequency-ranked list, filter by length band, then curate the top tier yourself. The other thing worth reviewing is the repeat-guess path, which is where a stray life decrement can hide for months without anyone noticing.

Difficulty: EASY · 1 of 5
First playable: An evening
The original: 1 team-years
Released: 1894 · Classic
Genre: Word Game

The one-shot build prompt

Build a letter-guessing word game as a single self-contained HTML file. DOM plus inline SVG for the gallows drawing, Web Audio optional, no build step, no dependencies.

Requirements:
- Words load from a words.json file grouped by category and difficulty, at least 300 entries, never inlined in the game logic. Lower case, letters and hyphens only.
- The load-bearing detail is the guess handler, and it has three parts that agents routinely get two of. A correct guess reveals EVERY occurrence of that letter, not the first. A repeat of an already-guessed letter costs nothing and produces a message rather than a life. And the win check compares the set of guessed letters against the set of UNIQUE letters in the word, not against its length, or a word with four Es will never resolve.
- Hyphens and spaces are revealed from the start and are not guessable.
- Six wrong guesses allowed. Draw the figure as SVG paths revealed in order: head, body, left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg, each stroked in over 300 ms via stroke-dashoffset.
- Physical keyboard input plus an on-screen QWERTY layout, both greying out spent letters. Correct guesses flash green, wrong flash red, 150 ms.
- On a loss, reveal the word and highlight the letters that were never tried.
- Category picker and a streak counter in localStorage.

Definition of done: guessing E in a word containing three of them reveals all three at once, and pressing E again costs me nothing.

Before you start🧰 The toolkit — models, MCP servers, art and 3D

What you lose

Nothing legally. The earliest recorded version is an 1894 collection of children's games
A word list somebody curated by hand, which is the entire difference between a good build and a bad one
The 1976 Milton Bradley box with Vincent Price grinning out of it
Playground negotiation over whether proper nouns are allowed

What to steal

Rank guesses by expected information gain

Scoring a question by how evenly it splits the remaining possibilities hands you a hint system, a bot and a difficulty measure out of one function, and it works in any deduction game — Mastermind, Wordle, twenty questions, a diagnostic tree. It also routinely disagrees with the obvious frequency answer, which is how you know it is doing something.

ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game

Build a guess-ranking tool for a deduction game. Single self-contained HTML file, DOM only, no dependencies, no build step.

- Load a word list and filter to one length. That filtered set is the candidate pool.
- For each unguessed letter, partition the pool by the response it would produce: the exact set of positions that letter occupies, with absence counting as its own group. Score the letter by the Shannon entropy of the group sizes, in bits. Highest entropy is the best question, because it splits the pool most evenly whatever the answer turns out to be.
- Show the full ranked table: letter, group count, largest group, entropy. The largest group is the worst case, so print it beside the average.
- A second ranker using plain letter frequency, for comparison.
- An auto-play mode running five hundred games under each ranker, printing mean guesses used.

Definition of done: entropy ranking beats letter frequency by a printed number of guesses per game, and it sometimes prefers a letter that appears in fewer words.

Make it different

Not a clone — Hangman re-themed and cut down to something you can finish. The angle is the important reel: it is what turns a project into a weekend. 24,360 ways to land.

Seasonal One Room

Hangman, but one level, done properly, set in a farmer’s market circuit. Rendered in soft pastel indie.

Themea farmer’s market circuit

Angleone level, done properly

Looksoft pastel indie

Build a browser game called "Seasonal One Room".

The pitch in one line: a word game in the spirit of Hangman, but one level, done properly, set in a farmer’s market circuit.

WHAT THIS IS
Take the SHAPE of Hangman — its core loop, and whatever makes that loop good — and rebuild it as your own game in a different world at a smaller scope. Use your own names, art and audio, which you want anyway: a reskin of somebody else's game is less interesting than a new one that works the same way.

THE ANGLE — this is the important constraint, honour it above everything else
One level, done properly. A single space, built to a finish quality you could not sustain across twenty. Every prop and every sightline is deliberate.
This is what makes the project finishable. If a decision would push the scope back towards the original's, take the smaller option every time.

THE THEME
A farmer’s market circuit. Crops, weather and regular customers. The year loops; the skill is learning the seasons.
The theme is not a coat of paint. Let it change what the mechanics mean — a reload, a health pack and a locked door should all be things that make sense in this world and nowhere else.

LOOK
Soft pastel indie. Desaturated pastels, round characters, gentle bloom, and UI handwriting that stays legible at small sizes.

REQUIREMENTS
- Runs in a browser with no build step. Canvas 2D unless the angle genuinely requires 3D, in which case three.js.
- Fixed-timestep update loop with interpolated rendering, so it behaves the same at 60Hz and 144Hz.
- Every tuning constant in one CONFIG object at the top, exposed as live sliders in a debug panel. You will find the feel by dragging those, not by prompting.
- All content — levels, entities, balance numbers — in JSON or plain data files, never inline in the logic.
- Audio generated with the Web Audio API rather than asset files.
- Respect prefers-reduced-motion: keep the fades, drop the shake and the parallax.

BUILD ORDER
1. The core loop with placeholder rectangles, at the reduced scope the angle demands. No theme, no art, no audio. Make it fun as rectangles first.
2. The angle's consequences. Cutting to bots, or to turn-based, or to one level changes the design rather than just shrinking it — find out how and rewrite step 1.
3. The theme, as content and data.
4. The look, applied last as a rendering layer over a game that already works.

Start by writing a one-page plan: the core loop, what the angle removes and what that frees you to do properly, and what you are deliberately leaving out. Wait for me to approve it before writing code.

Prior art — read before you build

Half the time one of these already does what you wanted, and the other half it saves you a week of solving a problem someone documented in 1997.

Did you build it?

0Share on X

One count per game. No account — it is tied to a salted hash of your IP, which is not stored in a form anyone can reverse. Every build adds 1 team-years to the counter on the homepage.

Then try these

Or roll something nobody has built yet →

Questions

How hard is Hangman to rebuild with an AI agent?

Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Hangman is EASY (1 of 5). You will get essentially the whole thing. Nothing is hard, and whether it is any good is decided entirely by a word list somebody curated by hand. Reckon on an evening to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 1 team-years Unknown, Victorian parlour game spent.

What makes Hangman hard to rebuild?

Nothing is hard, and whether it is any good is decided entirely by a word list somebody curated by hand. That is why it sits at EASY rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is rank guesses by expected information gain — an evening of work.

How long does it take to build a Hangman clone?

Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Hangman — the original took Unknown, Victorian parlour game on the order of 1 team-years, released in 1894 on Classic. What you can do is reach something playable and genuinely yours in about an evening, and then keep going for as long as it stays interesting. Any figure that claims otherwise is measuring a prototype and calling it a game.

What do I lose by building my own Hangman?

Nothing legally. The earliest recorded version is an 1894 collection of children's games. A word list somebody curated by hand, which is the entire difference between a good build and a bad one. The 1976 Milton Bradley box with Vincent Price grinning out of it. Those are the parts a prompt will not hand you.

Which AI coding agent should I use to build it?

Any of Claude Code, Codex or Cursor will handle this prompt. Paste it as your first message, let the agent scaffold the project, then iterate on feel — the second, third and tenth prompts are where a game actually gets good. Work in an empty folder or a fresh git branch so you can throw it away cheaply.

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