Major lexagons update!

So, I finally updated lexagons.

I released lexagons almost a year ago! Can you believe it? I then worked on a bunch of updates to it, and then got super distracted.

The most immediate problem was the word rarity - it was… unintuitive. And often annoying.

Figuring out a global list of how relatively rare or common every word is probably an idea with some hubris, but I tried to do it anyway. The problem was I was taking all of my data from Google Books’ Ngram viewer, which heavily emphasises scientific and medical literature. So it said, yes, calcification is a super common word, did you not think about calendar instead?

So I took a bunch of different sources of data, blended them together, and weighted them. I fixed it!

But… what about all the other features I wanted to add? I worked on some of them, got a bit overwhelmed, and then distracted with other projects. (Most recently Super Spelling Ducks - please go wishlist it!)

But the whole time, in the back of my mind… you have a lot of pending changes to lexagons? Why don’t you push that out?

So I finally did it. Now I can rest (rather, go back to Super Spelling Ducks!)

Here’s some of the new features I’ve added to lexagons:

• The game is now themed as a sort of gameshow presented by a duck called Richard Goldeneye. There’s a new tutorial where he walks you through how to play.
• The word rarity was completely rebalanced, and now just rates every word’s rarity out of 5 stars. I’ve played a lot of games of the new version, and so have my testers, and I’m a lot happier with it.
• You can lookup the definition of any word in the game. Just tap on the word at the top, or tap on the book icons when they appear.
• The UI has been freshened up!
• You earn currency (duckats) for playing. These can be used to unlock new dictionary ducks, unlock new lexagon ranks, and you can pay once per game to get one extra heart if you run out! You also earn duckats whenever you make a rarer word than you’ve ever made before!
• Statistics are displayed across all of your games. This is only available with the full version unlockable on mobile. You can download the mobile version here.