Puzzle idea to develop an app as a birthday gift

Question

I plan to develop a simple fun puzzle app and install it on my wife's phone to play with it, as her birthday gift.

The puzzle should be very simple, as I don't have much extra time to spend on its development. Ideally, the app should consist of simple widgets like buttons, images, texts ...

---

So far, I have this in mind which is like the word puzzle in Wheel of Fortune:

• A random word is taken out of dictionary
• A blank space is shown for each word letter. All letters are hidden at this point
• User (wife) guesses the word letters by pressing on an alphabet table
• If the pressed letter is in word, the corresponding word letters are shown
• At some point, if user wants to guess the whole word, user can type the guess in a text field
• Depending upon how fast user can guess the word, user gets coins/scores
• Next random word is taken out of dictionary and the game cycle repeats

But this idea is not unique. I wonder if somebody can suggest ideas which are more unique or exotic. Thanks.

Answer 1

Of course, it depends greatly on what kinds of puzzles your wife likes, and what kinds she doesn't like. If you have some idea of that, please mention it here, and we can tailor our answers accordingly.

That notwithstanding, recently on this site, "bulls and cows"-type puzzles have been popular. This is similar to the game Mastermind, where an answer consists of, say, a 4-digit number, with each digit different from the others (or not, depending on what rules you set). The player makes a series of guesses, and for each guess, the player is told how many digits are correct and in the correct place ("bulls"), and how many are correct but out of place ("cows"). You can also play this game with words instead of numbers, which might be an easier way to play for certain types of people.

The way the word variation would work is as follows. First, choose the word size you wish to design the game around. Four letters is probably best. If, on one round of the game, the answer is 'blue', and the player guesses 'fish', the player is told there are 0 bulls and 0 cows, as none of the letters in the player's guess match letters in the answer. On the next turn, if the player guesses 'vape', the player is told that there is 1 bull and 0 cows, as only one letter appears in the answer, and it is in the correct position. This can continue until the player finally guesses the word.

There are bulls and cows apps available on app stores now, so you could download and play a couple to see how the gameplay works.

Perhaps your wife would enjoy something like this.

Answer 2

Well, if Hangman isn't enough for her, you could try a Scrabble variant.

My personal favourite is where the list of words is pre-supplied, and you have to maximize your score.