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Tessera
A 4x4 word puzzle where rows and columns have to spell words
A few days ago I was made redundant from my job as a designer. That's not a fun sentence to write, but here we are. Rather than spend the time refreshing LinkedIn and feeling sorry for myself, I decided to do the thing that always centres me: make stuff.
I had a list of small ideas I'd been carrying around for a while. CooperPixel (a pixel typeface I'd been doodling glyph by glyph). Cairn (a chill stone-stacking toy I'd wanted since watching someone build one on a Korean travel show). Cherryade (the follow-up mint to my Pandimensionals NFT project from years ago). And this, a Wordle-shaped daily puzzle for word people who like grids.
A redundancy gap turns out to be a decent maker's residency, if you let it be one.
There's a whole drawer of daily word puzzles now. Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, Strands. I wanted to build one but didn't want to clone any of them.
The rule that hooked me was: every row spells a word, AND every column spells a word too. A 4x4 grid where the constraint runs both ways. Simple to state, dense to solve. You can't just optimise rows or you'll break columns. The grid pushes back.
You start scrambled, you swap two tiles at a time, you try to land on the day's solution. The fewer swaps, the better.
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About Tessera on Product Hunt
“A 4x4 word puzzle where rows and columns have to spell words”
Tessera was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 2 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #132 on the daily leaderboard. A daily word puzzle. Swap tiles on a 4×4 grid until every row spells a word, and every column too. Same puzzle for everyone, every day.
Tessera was featured in Indie Games (7.1k followers), Puzzle Games (4.3k followers) and Games (98.5k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 31k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Tessera?
Tessera was hunted by PJ Cooper. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how Tessera stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
PJ Cooper