December 30, 2025
Baby’s first word fight
Show HN: Tidy Baby is a SET game but with words
Wordy SET clone sparks rip‑off drama and dysentery jokes
TLDR: Tidy Baby turns the card game SET into a word match: pick the third word by length, part of speech, and style. The crowd’s split between “fun but too easy,” UI fixes like monospaced fonts, and a spicy “Only Connect rip-off” debate — with Oregon Trail dysentery jokes for flair.
Hacker News just met “Tidy Baby,” a word‑based riff on the matching card game SET, and the comment section immediately turned into a puzzle‑nerd cage match. The game shows you two words and a grid, and you pick the third that fits three simple traits: word length (3–5 letters), part of speech (noun/verb/adjective), and text style (bold/underline/italic). One commenter summed it up: is it “just recognizing which candidate completes the set?” Others said the difficulty names — Steady, Strenuous, Grueling — sound like a trail ride, prompting the very 90s‑kid joke: “Hope nobody gets dysentery.”
The hottest take? Originality beef. A user called it a “blatant rip off” of the BBC quiz Only Connect, even with a wink toward Wyna Liu of NYT Connections. Meanwhile, gameplay critics slammed “have two, find the third” as too easy, saying part of speech is the only real brain‑burner and asking for a mode where you hunt full sets without hand‑holding. Visual nitpickers chimed in too: use a monospaced font so players don’t have to count letters to spot length differences. Verdict from the crowd: neat idea, meme‑worthy vibes, but they want harder puzzles, cleaner visuals, and fewer déjà‑vu TV quiz echoes. The baby’s cute — now make it bite
Key Points
- •Tidy Baby is a word-based puzzle inspired by the SET card game.
- •Gameplay is built around three dimensions: word length, part of speech, and text style.
- •Word length values are constrained to 3, 4, or 5 letters.
- •Part of speech options are noun, verb, or adjective.
- •Text style options are bold, underline, or italic; a How To Play page is provided for rules.