Just recently, the Standard games have been more challenging than the Challenge games, at least from my standpoint.

Over the past week, I've fired up the game, and the Standard game has left me struggling to find the nine-letter word for up to two hours, as well as providing annoying 'so near yet so far' moments with missing letters that would have doubled or even tripled my word tally. By contrast, I've been able to find the nine-letter solution for the Challenge game in under five minutes, and rattle off a decent word list in 30 minutes. Today the nine-letter was the first word that sprang to mind when seeing the Challenge puzzle, and everything else fell into place from that point on.

Am I unique here, or has anyone else experienced this phenomenon?

Today (2nd February) I've had to struggle to find the Standard 9-letter, and only just scraped past the "better" mark, while the Challenge game has been much less frustrating!

Is this some sort of statistical anomaly I've simply been unfortunate to encounter, or are we going to see a permanent role reversal in place?

In one of the recent past puzzles, I tried Lieder. Which was promptly flagged as "unknown".

Finding that it wasn't even the rare word list puzzled me.

For those unfamiliar with the term, Lieder are the result of using a poem as the lyrics for a song with a classical music score. As the name suggests, they're most often thought of as German musical compositions, and indeed, the majority of extant Lieder are the products of German composers (Schumann was a particularly prolific composer of Lieder, with Schubert also being particularly associated with this genre Death and the Maiden being a possibly canonical example, followed by Richard Strauss, Brahms and Beethoven).

I admit that the term probably wouldn't have occurred to many people, but might have been in the minds of players with some background in classical music. I'm therefore surprised to find it not present even in the rare word list.

I wonder if anyone else here, has found themselves in the position of playing either the Standard or Challenge game, finding themselves with, say, a five-letter word they've just entered, only to notice that the remaining four letters also form a word, and that the two resulting words put together elicit a smile, or even laughter?

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one here to have had moments of off the wall humour arising from such occurrences ...

Anyone else here thinking that the Standard & Challenge puzzles were the wrong way round? 😀

Just tried today's puzzles (30th April 2018). Possibly the worst ones I've encountered thus far. The 10 letter in particular seems to have been crafted by a fulminatingly florid sadist.

Usually, I reach "better" after about 20 minutes. These three leave me struggling to come up with recognisable words I'd use reasonably often, and that's despite the fact that I routinely use, elsewhere, a raft of terms from various disciplines that invariably end up flagged as "rare" or "not known" here ...

From what bowels of the Ninth Circle did the puzzle generator drag these up from?

I tried to create a custom 10-letter puzzle to share with everyone, but for some reason, I was presented with the error message "This puzzle has no 10-letter word".

Which means that spiderling, as in a newly hatched spider, is missing from the database. An omission I consider in need of remedying, even without my passion for invertebrate zoology.

Today, I found more than twice as many words in the Challenge Chihuahua puzzle than the other two combined. I can't ever remember the Challenge being this much easier than the other two in the past, ever.

Without giving anything away, my thoughts on the Standard and 10 Letter for today, can be summed up as "what sort of warped mind thought these two choices would make good puzzles?" Unless of course you're the sort of person who has memorised the entire Scrabble Words tome, but coming to those two puzzles after 4 hours' JavaScript debugging made me wish I'd stayed with the JavaScript!

I've been working on a little project. A 3D modeller that resides in a web browser. It now works.

22,000 lines of JavaScript code is all it took. I think I've earned a little break now.