Launched this week

Tessera

Launched this week

A 4x4 word puzzle where rows and columns have to spell words

3 followers

A 4x4 word puzzle where rows and columns have to spell words

3 followers

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A daily word puzzle. Swap tiles on a 4×4 grid until every row spells a word, and every column too. Same puzzle for everyone, every day.

Free

Launch tags:Indie Games•Puzzle Games•Games

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Kinetik — AI agent to rule them all: content, ops, growth

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Maker

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A few days ago I was made redundant from my job as a designer. That's not a fun sentence to write, but here we are. Rather than spend the time refreshing LinkedIn and feeling sorry for myself, I decided to do the thing that always centres me: make stuff. I had a list of small ideas I'd been carrying around for a while. CooperPixel (a pixel typeface I'd been doodling glyph by glyph). Cairn (a chill stone-stacking toy I'd wanted since watching someone build one on a Korean travel show). Cherryade (the follow-up mint to my Pandimensionals NFT project from years ago). And this, a Wordle-shaped daily puzzle for word people who like grids. A redundancy gap turns out to be a decent maker's residency, if you let it be one. There's a whole drawer of daily word puzzles now. Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, Strands. I wanted to build one but didn't want to clone any of them. The rule that hooked me was: every row spells a word, AND every column spells a word too. A 4x4 grid where the constraint runs both ways. Simple to state, dense to solve. You can't just optimise rows or you'll break columns. The grid pushes back. You start scrambled, you swap two tiles at a time, you try to land on the day's solution. The fewer swaps, the better.

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5d ago

Maker

Hey Product Hunt 👋 Maker here.

I built Tessera in the gap after being made redundant from my role as a senior designer. Felt better than refreshing LinkedIn.

The rule that hooked me: every row spells a word, every column also spells a word.

A 4×4 grid where the constraint runs both ways. You can't optimise rows without breaking columns. The grid pushes back.

Three small details I'm proud of:
1. Curated dictionary. SOWPODS would have you guessing "ESES" once a week. I intersected it with the 2000 most-frequent four-letter English words from Wikipedia frequency data. Top ten gold words now: AREA, ARIA, UREA, ENDS, ALOE, ELSE, IDEA, TSAR, ORAL, ILIA.
2. Hint without giving the answer. Tiles whose letter belongs in their current row get a green outline. Not a fill — that's reserved for the right word — just a "you're warmer than you think" signal.
3. Positive tiers all the way down. A tough day shouldn't end on "Struggling". The slowest solver still made it. Tiers are Legendary, Genius, Wordsmith, Persistent, Tenacious.

Happy to answer questions about the build, the dictionary curation, or anything else. I'm UK-based so I'll be most active in your evening / my morning.

Full design write-up: https://www.pjcooper.design/blog/meet-tessera

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22h ago