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Show HN: Linex – A daily challenge: placing pieces on a board that fights back
by Humanista75
Hi HN,
I wanted to share a web game I’ve been building in HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, and PHP called LINEX.
It is primarily designed and optimized to be played in the mobile browser.
The idea is simple: you have an 8x8 board where you must place pieces (Tetris-style and some custom shapes) to clear horizontal and vertical lines.
Yes, someone might think this has already been done, but let me explain.
You choose where to place the piece and how to rotate it. The core interaction consists of "drawing" the piece tap-by-tap on the grid, which provides a very satisfying tactile sense of control and requires a much more thoughtful strategy.
To avoid the flat difficulty curve typical of games in this genre, I’ve implemented a couple of twists:
1. Progressive difficulty (The board fights back): As you progress and clear lines, permanently blocked cells randomly appear on the board. This forces you to constantly adapt your spatial vision.
2. Tools to defend yourself: To counter frustration, you have a very limited number of aids (skip the piece, choose another one, or use a special 1x1 piece). These resources increase slightly as the board fills up with blocked cells, forcing you to decide the exact right moment to use them.
The game features a daily challenge driven by a date-based random seed (PRNG). Everyone gets exactly the same sequence of pieces and blockers. Furthermore, the base difficulty scales throughout the week: on Mondays you start with a clean board (0 initial blocked cells, although several will appear as the game progresses), and the difficulty ramps up until Sunday, where you start the game with 3 obstacles already in place.
In addition to the global medal leaderboard, you can add other users to your profile to create a private leaderboard and compete head-to-head just with your friends.
Time is also an important factor, as in the event of a tie in cleared lines, the player who completed them faster will rank higher on the leaderboard.
I would love for you to check it out. I'm especially looking for honest feedback on the difficulty curve, the piece-placement interaction (UI/UX), or the balancing of obstacles/tools, although any other ideas, critiques, or suggestions are welcome.
Thanks!
As a fellow amateur game dev, nice job!
Unfortunately, I (and likely many others on HN) am pretty sign-up adverse, and since this game seems like it should be perfectly playable 100% client-side, I think this is going to really hurt adoption.
Yeah, I was excited to give it a try but I won't sign up without at least trying a few puzzles first.
You already can play without sign up.
Swipe-draw would be nice (i.e. mouse down/tap, sweep cursor/finger through the squares of the shape, mouseup/lift). Also, tapping the red shape in the top right corner to rotate would help for those of us who need help visualizing which orientation that L or Z piece you gave us is in.
Thank you all so much for your comments. Regarding the possibility of playing without logging in, I've modified the code to allow it. You can now try my game without logging in ;)
Thank you!
Thanks! Fun game.
I like it!
One big annoyance with the power-ups is that the failure condition is checked before you can use them. It's particularly painful since they all replace the current piece, so they seem tailor-made to get rid of a nasty piece that would cause you to lose... but then they have to be used before you get to that piece that would cause you to lose!
Anyway, both times I played I got in the 40s without any power-ups used, then saw that the next piece would cause me to lose but none of the powers could save me. Probably the ideal fix is just to not trigger a loss while you still have powers?
Yes, exactly, good idea! I have this on my mind, and now I'm thinking about the best way to adopt it.
This looks nice but the initial sign-up barrier seems unnecessary. I don't want to create an account and validate my e-mail address before knowing what the challenges and the app actually are. This also introduces a 30s to 2m window until the confirmation e-mail is delivered.
It might improve the flow to first letting them play a challenge (does not have to be daily challenge, e.g., just the demo tetris-like game from the starting page) and then introduce the account sign up afterward.
To comment on the actual game (tested on Firefox desktop):
- The yellow box with hints overflows (and is cut off) in the middle of the second paragraph
- The site layout appears to be optimized for mobile (portrait) screens. But the actual interactive elements look to small for touch targets. For desktops (if that is a target), consider using the horizontal space more (e.g., for the box with hints or the leaderboard(s))
- The tooltips on the actions at the top of the lines games board were not in English (appear to be maybe Spanish/Portuguese). Seems like a missing translation (my language preferences are en;de).
- the lines game itself was fine, the idea is okay but I don't think I want to play more than 2-3 rounds of it (which is okay for a daily challenge-ish game). An improvement might be to highlight (with a light background on the board) what combinations of piece layouts are possible after placing the first block (e.g., the straight piece only has 4 possible layouts after the first block and one after the second).
Thanks so much for taking the time to test it and giving such thorough feedback!
Yellow box: You were totally right. The copy was a bit too long for certain browser/font configurations. I'm shortening the text so it fits perfectly without breaking the layout.
Layout/Targets: Spot on. The game was built strictly as for mobile to be played with one hand. Playing it on a big monitor right now is probably a bit of a torture! ;)
Tooltips: Nice catch! I had hardcoded the title attributes in Spanish and completely forgot to pass them through the translation dictionary. Fixed and deployed!
Highlighting piece projections: This is actually a really nice UX idea! I originally left it out because part of the core challenge is forcing the player to mentally visualize the rotations and placements, but I completely see how it would reduce the cognitive load.
Really appreciate the honest review!
Nice! Consider adding this to https://hnarcade.com :)
Edit: never mind! Already done! https://hnarcade.com/games/games/linex
I enjoyed playing Linex! It reminds me of doing perfect clear solves in Tetris, but without the stress :) I appreciate the skip, next, and hole-fill power ups.
If you don't mind me asking, how are you doing piece generation? Is it random%7, drawing from a bag, or something else?
It's neither purely random 7 nor like drawing from a bag. It's a little bit more complex.
If I were to explain it the technical way: I use a custom Linear Congruential Generator (LCG) seeded by the current date (YYYYMMDD) to ensure deterministic gameplay—everyone gets the exact same piece sequence every day. I don't use flat probabilities; instead, I run the LCG output through a weighted roulette that changes based on the day of the week (e.g., higher probability for 'I' pieces on Mondays, higher for 'S' and 'Z' pieces on Sundays). Lastly, there's a system to mitigate consecutive identical pieces.
In simpler terms: I use a formula based on the current date to generate a different sequence of pieces every day, guaranteeing it's exactly the same for all users on that specific day. Then, I adjust this sequence using a probability matrix so that on Mondays you get more of the easy pieces (like the line or square), and on Sundays you get more of the hard ones (like S or Z).
This is the probability matrix:
const pieceProbabilities = { 1: [0.20, 0.18, 0.16, 0.14, 0.14, 0.09, 0.09], // Monday 2: [0.18, 0.17, 0.15, 0.14, 0.14, 0.11, 0.11], // Tuesday 3: [0.16, 0.15, 0.15, 0.14, 0.14, 0.13, 0.13], // Wednesday 4: [0.14, 0.14, 0.14, 0.14, 0.14, 0.15, 0.15], // Thursday 5: [0.12, 0.12, 0.12, 0.15, 0.15, 0.17, 0.17], // Friday 6: [0.10, 0.12, 0.12, 0.15, 0.15, 0.18, 0.18], // Saturday 7: [0.09, 0.10, 0.13, 0.15, 0.15, 0.19, 0.19] // Sunday };
I hope this explains it well!
This is a lovely game. It's simple, and clever, and you have no one to blame but yourself when you lose. Thank you!
I'd love to be able to play by dragging. On mobile it would be really nice if I could draw the shapes with my finger
I’m so glad you like it! Regarding what you said about dragging the piece... I get how convenient that is, but I don’t know, I feel these 'micro-pleasures' every time I draw the piece with my finger. It’s like you have more control over the game, and it also slows down the pace a bit, which makes you think more about your next move. I feel like those few seconds you spend drawing the piece make the gameplay more thoughtful and strategic. Don’t you think?
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code