Rewind to Saturday, February 18th, 2022: I was living in upstate New York with my two best buds, and we were throwing an excellent dinner party (I think we made some sort of fishy noodle bowl). Wordle had just been bought for over a million dollars, and spelling games, in general, were having their moment in the spotlight. After dinner, a friend pulled out a phone and started working on one of the NYT games. Three hours later, we were all still at the table, cramped in thinking positions on our chairs. We went through every game we could find, played the new Wordle at midnight, and then, all of a sudden, lost steam. This obsessive mood had taken over each of us. It was perfect. As everyone started to trickle out and my roommates and I got to the dishes, I began to think about a more solitaire-esque spelling game, one you could play without needing someone to come up with a special set of letters or an interesting word for the day — something you could just keep playing.
Most spelling games get harder as they go by implementing a no-repeats rule. While this sort of rule is almost a given for the genre, it gives a lot of spelling games shallow gameplay loops: spell a word using these letters, repeat. I wanted a game that got harder not only as you spelled words but also because you played that word then. I wanted a spelling game with a bigger strategy, and I wanted to get there by solving the shallow gameplay loop problem. How could I give a game rhythm, places to rest, and intermediate checkpoints to take pride in having reached, naturally, while making it get harder? And so I spitballed with my roommates while we cleaned up, and we landed on the setup and rules that became Tally later that night.
Tally is broken up into rounds. Players finish rounds by spelling words that use a given set of letters exactly and only five times each. At first, this is trivial. For example, at the start of a game, a player just needs to use some random letter five times by spelling words; however, with the completion of each round, the most-used letter the player doesn't already have to contend with is added to the mix. This gets hard fast if you don't pay attention.
Consider an example: vowels are useful letters, and most players start using them to make words after they've gone through obvious single-syllable words that hit their letters. These players soon find themselves in a bad spot that gets worse as each round gets harder: they can only use each vowel five times in a given round. What happens if they can't get through all their consonants first?
In general in Tally, not only does gameplay overall get harder the more rounds you play (the more of the alphabet you have to contend with), but gameplay within each round gets harder as you start maxing out useful letters. Players must play strategically both within each round and outside of rounds, planning out which letters they want and in what order, then playing out the round with their additional, self-imposed, and strategic constraints.
I was so high on the idea that I made it on the spot. I used glitch.com both to develop and host it, which was pretty standard for me at the time. The game was done by 4 AM that morning. It was one of those great projects I'll always look back on with total fondness, and my friends at college got a real kick out of it. Give it a go! See how far you can get into the alphabet. I think the highest I ever got was round 22, and I'd still love to see someone get all the way past round 26.