Ilandrah, I
have given some thought to puzzles with shorter time limits.
I had thought that players might use the "Your puzzles" tab to create a quick puzzle competition, but almost all of the published custom puzzles have a duration of 1, 2 or 3
days. There have been only a handful of published puzzles of one hour's duration or less. Yet I find, looking at the data records, that quite a lot of
unpublished puzzles have had a life span of 10 minutes, 15 minutes or 20 minutes. So some players set themselves a time limit, but don't open the competition up to others. In this, players are probably being realistic - if you published a puzzle with a life less than one hour, you would probably be the only person to play it anyway.
An illustration of what can be done with a short duration word game is some of the online implementations of the Boggle concept:
WEBoggle and
WordSplay. On each of these sites there is a continual stream of 3-minute games, with a gap of a minute or so between the games. There seem to be enough people playing at any given time to make it interesting.
Three minutes is probably too short for Chihuahua, but I think one hour would be too long. If you came to the site, found a one-hour game that had been going for 20 minutes and played it until you had run out of words, would you then wait around till the puzzle closed, to see what words you missed, and how you were placed on the final scoreboard? I think the key to a time limit is that it be not long enough for most players. So, when the competition stops, you will be still frantically looking for words. For Chi, this might be around 10 minutes, maybe even less.
If we had an ongoing series of 10-minute games, would there be enough competitors to make it interesting? Possibly not.
One idea I came up with a while ago was a time-trial competition, as they have in cycling. The puzzle might be open for 24 hours, but each player would be limited to 10 minutes of play, or whatever limit would make it exciting. You would see the scores of those who have already played, and maybe there could be a display comparing your performance so far with that of previous players at the same point in time. There could be separate rankings for common words and all words, and for players using keyboard or mouse. Maybe wrong words could be deducted from your score, or there might be a limit of how many wrong attempts you were allowed before being disqualified.