Really love the idea and loved playing solo. Someday, when friends can gather close enough again, I look forward to trying it at a party. How did you generate the data set? I understand it's gathered from a large corpus. Did you write code to generate the set, or did you acquire the data from elsewhere?
I see this was released in 2017. I hope you haven't set this aside. The game has a lot of potential for mobile, with either live synchronous or asynchronous play, and this would make a great game in the Jackbox style.
I got the data from here:
https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/
It's usually used in linguistics research. It looks like they've just updated it (April 2020)!
Thanks for the words of encouragement. I have been thinking about making a small Jackbox-like collection including this.
Comments like this definitely help get me excited about exploring that!
My wife and I played about 20 rounds in a row last night. She wasn't a fan of being locked out of an answer if the other player says it first, because it gives a big first-mover advantage, but I think it's the right design choice given that all answers are shown on the same screen. Another nice choice you made that I might not have thought of is allowing any given word to be used only once per game, so you can't just answer "man" or whatever to every prompt. I was surprised at how many prompts repeated over the course of 20 matches. Given the size of the data set, I'd have expected far fewer repeats.
Thanks for the link to the data source. As a puzzle- and game-maker, I think I'll find a lot of interesting uses...
20 rounds! Nice!
Very cool you caught all of those design decisions. Locking out definitely does give fast-movers an advantage, which could be annoying for more methodical folks. Asynchronous/mobile would solve that. For local multiplayer, I like the added pressure/drama.
Re: one use per game. Yeah, I often found myself always trying the same word over and over, which didn't seem all that interesting.
Also interesting about getting the same prompts. I'll look at how I choose. I bet I limited to a certain extent since this was primarily designed for exhibitions. Maybe I'll open it up a bit when I finish fixing up the keyboard bugs.
The data set used to be paid for commercial use. Great to see it's now free. I'd love to see what you make with it. If you end up using it, let me know!