The game was actually originally built to do exactly what you describe, with every letter you fail tipping you over a little, until a certain number of failures would push you past the balance point, but I decided that it might be more "theme consistent" to set the number of failures back to just 1.
If I'd thought about it more I'd have had the option to choose between standard and "challenge" mode, standard would have been the 3 failures, and challenge could have been the "no failures".
Thanks again for playing, I'm really glad you had fun!