※ a daily word game that doesn't suck
OK, I’m kidding with the faint praise—Bracket City is easily the best thing I’ve seen on the internet in about a year. It’s billed as “a nested clue puzzle game,” but it’s more fun to just see it yourself than for me to explain. (If I had to try: It’s like a crossword, but Inception-ized.)
It’s fast and fun and my whole family (2 adults, one teenager, one 5th grader) loves it. But here are some things I especially love about it:
1. plaintext and proud
Bracket City is cut from the same cloth as my other favorite web toy, TXT.FYI: no logos or clever visual flourishes, just a lot of monospace fonts and Markdown. But instead of feeling cheap or thoughtless, it feels distilled, sturdy, and welcoming. Like Amish furniture.
2. “interactivity considered harmful”
This phrase comes from the Nikola Tesla of UI design, Bret Victor, who argued that many basic digital interactions (clicking “OK”, selecting input fields, navigating menus, etc.) are pointless labor. They could be streamlined or removed completely and not only would you not notice, you’d be happier.
Bracket City is a perfect example. Here’s its entire gameplay interface:
The box is already highlighted. There’s no “Submit” button. You don’t even have to tell it which clue you’re answering. It just goes. (Note: this is definitely best experienced on a laptop with a physical keyboard.)
3. unabashedly (but not aggressively) nerdy
What first got me in Bracket City’s door wasn’t the game itself but rather its short “Word of the Day” promotional emails, written by programmer/New Yorker contributor (and my favorite science writer) James Somers. He’s less a connoisseur of words than a country veterinarian of them, bringing the same brisk, unfussy regard to weird terms like “iff” and “modal” as he does to ordinary ones like “list” and “license.” (And yes, I did learn something new about those last two.)
4. “a prize in every box”
A big part of Bracket City’s dorky charm comes from the way it reveals a fun Wikipedia fact or YouTube clip when the puzzle is solved. It’s like the toy inside a Cracker Jack box: a little promise made and kept every time, reliable and disposable in the best way.
in sum
It’s great, go play. To send you off, here’s a tiny clickable homage I hacked together:
