Show HN: Wonderhop – A daily game: guess what most people say, or what none do

5 days ago (wonderhop.io)

Hello HN!

Wonderhop is a small browser game with no account needed to play, everyday there are 4 rounds of 7 quesitons like "Name a food that a lot of people hate" The goal depends on the mode: Either gives the answer most people would give, the one no one would give, the oldest answer or the most recent one and there's a leaderboard for the day.

The most interesting part of the project was understanding answers that are typed freely and in 10 languages, there was some typos, plurals, nickname, or even duplicate way of sayign the same thing. We needed AI judge that checks it really existes conencted to some API like wikipedia to judge the veracity of each answer really quickly (less than 1s on average)

The percentage starts from an estimate but move really fast with the answers of real players. If the list missed a good answer, it gets added as soon as a few different players give it.

(There are also a lot of secrets and pop culture references added in the game :) )

A large part of the code was written with AI tools, but the artistic direction the concept and every choice design are human-made

We'd love to know if the goal is clear from the very first question while playing and were any good answers rejected unfairly

We are a couple of developers from Montreal that like guessing games so we built this in about two month.

Thanks a lot!

101 comments

mtlduo

Reply
abcd_f  2 days ago

Looks like a straight https://krillion.io clone with some trivial extensions and a much smaller sampling base?

Beijing being 3rd less popular answer for "Asian capital city" is pretty bizarre.

  • darepublic  12 hours ago

    I did also notice that in the abyss mode I gave some answers that "should" be popular but weren't and I'm wondering if it's simply because of small sample size.

jwstillwater  5 days ago

This was so fun! What a delight, thank you. After the first round I wanted to keep playing, so habitually I just tapped whichever button that most closely resembled ‘play again’, and it took me a couple questions to understand that it was a different mode. Maybe putting “type the OLDEST answer”, or “the deepest cut” above the prompt box would help.

Also the model’s feedback was surprisingly astute! I expected “incorrect”, but got “Help was a top-selling Beatles album, but it sold under 20 million copies.” Love learning during games.

Great work, the lot of you!

  • mtlduo  5 days ago

    Thank you so much for your message, it's really encouraging to read, and it means a lot to us!

    Good point about the mode switch. My girlfriend actually warned me about it, and I told her it wouldn't be a problem but she was right haha.

    We'll take your advice and give it a clearer name.

    And I'm really glad you liked the feedback. Thanks again for playing! :)

bennettnate5  2 days ago

I was playing the "Future" section and put "Milliway's" from The Hitchhiker's Guide series when it asked for a fictional restaurant; it only gave me 10 points and said it was from 70s. Milliways is very explicitly positioned in time at the end of the universe, so I should've been awarded maximum points there :)

  • mtlduo  2 days ago

    Hi thanks for the feedback! In Past and Future, what counts is when the thing first came out, not when the story takes place, so Milliways counts as 1978 (the radio series). I agree it's not obvious with sci-fi though o I think I'll add a mention somewhere

earthdeity  14 hours ago

Nice game! There's no noticeable feedback form on the site. I played it today and was a bit peeved that "Ocean's 11" for "oldest heist movie" matched the 2001 film especially as "Ocean's 11 (1960)" was actually in the list. That's not what the movie was called in 1960... I guess there's some improvements to the matching needed.

  • mtlduo  11 hours ago

    Hey, thanks a lot for the feedback! You're right about Ocean's 11. Right now the judge gets it wrong about 1.5% of the time, and I'm actively monitoring it to try to find a solution for cases like this one. Thanks again for playing! :)

cwnyth  2 days ago

Plenty of good answers were rejected, especially where typos were concerned. On the coffee shop question, CK's coffee shop wasn't found and Waffle House was rejected, but Paul's was a top answer? Paul's also serves breakfast food. Seems arbitrary. Memphis Colosseum was rejected probably because the proper spelling is Coliseum. But how could it not find it from "Memphis Colosseum"? It's easily found (and the spelling corrected) in Google Search.

  • mtlduo  2 days ago

    Hey, thanks a lot for the feedback! Most answers are first checked against a fixed list, to avoid making too many LLM calls. Unfortunately, for latency and playability reasons, we can't do much deeper online searches: every call would cost a lot and take too long. So about 1 to 1.5% of answers end up judged a bit unfairly, but we're actively working on improving the model. Thanks again for your feedback!

_bent  2 days ago

The judging for the "newest" seems a bit odd - for viral toy I answered 'Labubu' which the AI dates to 2015, which might be when they were first introduced to the market, but not when they had their viral hype. For newest palace I answered Berliner Stadtschloss which was opened in 2020, but the AI dates it back to 1443

  • mtlduo  2 days ago

    Thanks a lot for the feedback!

    Both dates are actually "right" from the game's point of view: Labubu was created in 2015 (the viral hype came way later), and construction of the Berliner Stadtschloss started in 1443, the 2020 opening is the reconstruction. In Past and Future, what counts is when the thing first came out/was created, and the dates come from the Wikipedia API. I agree it's not obvious when the question says "viral" or "newest" though, so I'll make those questions more precise. Thanks again for playing! :)

    • darraghmckay  2 days ago

      Similarly it asked for Formula 1 World Champion, in the "most recent" game, so I put in Lando Norris, who won last year, but the answer is Max Verstapen because he was born in 1999 and Lando was 1997, it took me a few minutes to even figure out what the leaderboard was saying..

      Some clarity there would be much better

knownandunknown  2 days ago

Fun game! But it looks like matching has a bug:

The question was "Name something that's expensive when travelling" in the most common answer category.

I wrote "tickets", meaning plane tickets, and it categorized my answer as "Entrance fees (you)" instead of the top answer of "Plane ticket".

  • zahlman  2 days ago

    That makes sense to me; people commonly buy tickets for local events while on vacation. Perhaps it should detect and warn about that kind of ambiguity, though.

handwoven  2 days ago

It incorrectly said that Li Xiang was not acceptable as a brand named after its founder

  • tigger0jk  2 days ago

    Yeah I feel like it's a core problem with these games, especially when asking for rare answers, it's impossible to get the knowledge base right.

    'HashiCorp is not named after a person; the name comes from "hash" (computing) and "corp"'

    Nah it's named after the founder Mitchell Hashimoto.

    Per the wikipedia summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp

    > The company name HashiCorp is a portmanteau of co-founder last name Hashimoto and Corporation.

    • notabotiswear  2 days ago

      I typed Pentax (a pumps brand) for the least mentioned Italian brands question. It insisted that it's the Japanese cameras brand.

      The aesthetics are nice, but I think the idea of the game itself is seriously flawed.

jdthedisciple  2 days ago

Creative idea, I like it.

This would be fun to play in groups, comparing answers after each round, but I think the strict timer would make that impossible. Maybe add a different mode?

Also I love the through yet swift feedback on incorrect answers. Did you leverage decision models for that?

kisaThisaUbisa  1 day ago

Is there a place other than this post to submit feedback? I have found a number of issues with answers accepted/not accepted

rensa000222  2 days ago

I’m from a non-English-speaking country, but I understood how to play right away. I did struggle a bit with questions about things like British TV series, though. The game has a wonderful atmosphere, and I really enjoyed playing it!

  • mtlduo  1 day ago

    Thank you! Really glad it was clear even in English. You can switch the game to your own language too :)

truehaley  3 days ago

Lots of fun, but one really annoying bug that makes it hard to play: anytime I have an answer that isn’t accepted, and then go to type in a new answer, the keyboard completely covers the text box which makes it impossible to delete or edit the previous answer! Safari on IOS 26.6.2

doodlebugging  2 days ago

I did it! Almost.

1824th of 1824. Dead last with a score of 60 that your game handed me on a misspelling. I typed Windy's and it changed it to Wendy's and awarded a correct answer.

I'm not sure how to feel about that.

rustyhancock  2 days ago

Can't use it as my font size is larger than average (due to bad vision) and I can't always access the next question button.

piperswe  4 days ago

I love that I could justify my answer to it - spoiler below

I chose CompuServe for oldest file sharing service, and it told me that it was an online service not a cloud file hosting service. I then answered "CompuServe had file sharing" and I received 100pts

  • mtlduo  4 days ago

    I'm really glad you liked it! That's one of the big advantages of using LLMs instead of relying on a fixed list of answers. Thanks so much for playing! :)

jraby3  2 days ago

This is super fun added it to my home screen.

On my iphone17e, some answers don't scroll so I can't click to continue to the next question.

dooglius  5 days ago

The agent is too helpful, I got away with stuff like "The one with the southmost shinkansen" for rarest Japanese city, which it substituted for the answer to that (which I didn't know)

  • mtlduo  5 days ago

    I see, thanks a lot for the feedback! That's a real hack of my LLM haha, I'll fix it within the hour!

amirkhanian  2 days ago

Love the "what none do" twist, I bet my first instinct would always be the most popular answer. Is it the same question for everyone each day?

garah  5 days ago

Just tried this on my phone and had fun. Got 260/700 in Sky — somehow “peanuts” and “Michael Jackson” were my only perfect answers lol.

bmfischer3  2 days ago

Great game. Had a lot of fun and shared this with my friends.

I like the fact no account is required.

  • mtlduo  2 days ago

    Thanks a lot and thanks for sharing it with your friends! we wanted people to be playing within 5 seconds of landing on the page. Glad you had fun! :)

glitchc  2 days ago

Down is much harder than up. Loved the ending.

  • mtlduo  2 days ago

    Thanks a lot!! Yes the abyss is meant to be the hard one. Really glad you liked the ending, it took us a while to get it right :)

bookdood  2 days ago

Didn't accept half my answers even though they were valid. Good luck replicating krillion.io next time.

elektor  2 days ago

I'm sorry but is this not just another AI remake of a very common game type?

I recall playing an identical game a few months ago, also on the HN front page.

https://www.krillion.org/

  • burkaman  2 days ago

    Yes this is clearly just a minor extension of Krillion, but that one was also AI-generated so it's hard to feel bad for them.

  • mtlduo  2 days ago

    Thanks you for the feedback, the concept doesn't come from Krillion or from me, there was already a game called Pointless on TV way before that, and Sky is straight up Family Feud, Past and Future are our own concepts And the graphics, even if the code and the implementation were obviously written with AI like 100% of people coding a big project today, they're human made

    • pavel_lishin  2 days ago

      But the Abyss mode looks almost identical to krillion - from the very concept of trying to guess rare answers, to the nautical diving theme, down to the almost-pixel-art style..?

      It's incredible to suggest that this wasn't based on either Krillion, or that both games were based on something else.

      (To be clear, I'm not accusing you of explicitly lifting the concept - but that's the problem with using AI to generate too much, it'll obviously re-use what it's seen before.)

      edit: actually, you say "A large part of the code was written with AI tools, but the artistic direction the concept and every choice design are human-made" - it's just wildly improbable for the two to look and feel so similar.

baud147258  5 days ago

Most wonderful fact is that 55% of people dream of visiting Paris. Of course living just next to Paris puts a damper to any desire to visit

  • mtlduo  5 days ago

    I also grew up next to Paris so I completely get it. Once you know it, it's less of a dream. Thanks a lot for your feedback :)

wccrawford  2 days ago

Rarest is terrible. I absolutely know that baked ube is a street food, and way less likely to be guessed than Udon, and yet I'm penalized for nobody else guessing it yet?

I didn't even play latest and oldest, because that's just a guessing game.

  • unsnap_biceps  2 days ago

    Oldest is fine and fun. It's oldest in terms of when, not answers. The oldest pyramid for example.

    I agree that the rarest wasn't nearly as entertaining or fun. Perhaps that one needs a list to pick from.

thereitgoes456  2 days ago

Great work. I’m bored of Krillion because the AI judge sucks and the animations are WAAAAYYYYY too long. This feels like an upgrade in every way. Will add to my daily rotation of snacks, thank you :)

  • mtlduo  2 days ago

    Thanks a lot, that's really kind! Glad it made it into your daily rotation :)