Lift or Land
Guess it and it lifts. Miss seven and it lands.
What it is
The old letter-by-letter guessing game, with a hot-air balloon in place of the gallows. A row of blanks sits under a theme, such as the farm or winter, with the alphabet below. Tap a letter: if it is in the word, it pops into every place it belongs; if not, a little air goes out of the balloon and it sinks a step. Fill in the word and the balloon floats off into the distance. Miss seven times and it settles gently onto a field, and its two passengers climb out and wave.
Seven dots down the side of the sky count the steps left. A wrong letter turns grey and is struck through, so colour is never the only cue, and a letter you have already tried costs nothing. When the balloon lands, the letters you didn’t find fill in, in orange.
The word is chosen before your first guess and never changes, and every word is safe for a classroom. Each one was checked against a list of words a public screen should never show, inside the word as well as whole, because a half-guessed word shows every run of letters it holds.
Play the game’s words alone: there are three levels, and a win moves you up one and a loss down one. Or set a word for someone and pass the screen across: choose a theme and pick one of three words, or spell your own with the game’s letters. A spelled word with an unsuitable word anywhere inside it is refused and cleared from the screen. A word someone else sets never moves your level.
How to play
- Start a wordTap anywhere
- GuessTap a letter
- Another wordNext word
- Play with someoneSet a word for someone
The game is playing a word by itself until you tap; that first tap starts your word and guesses nothing. Right letters fill in; wrong ones go grey and the balloon sinks. To play with someone, tap Set a word for someone: the guesser looks away while you choose a theme and pick one of three words, or spell your own, then hand it over. The speaker turns the sound on. Put the tablet down mid-word and it waits for you: nothing takes your word away.
On a desktop, click just as by touch. Or type a letter to guess it, and press Enter for the next word. When setting a word, 1, 2 or 3 picks one and the left and right arrows change the theme. To spell your own, click Spell my own word and type it: Backspace deletes, Enter uses it and Escape goes back.
What isn’t settled yet
English words only, and single words: no phrases or names.
Short words are the hard ones. A three-letter word with uncommon letters can beat anyone, and the harder levels are full of them.
You can’t choose the theme for your own game. Each word comes from a theme picked for you; only someone setting a word chooses one.
No hints. The theme above the word is the only help.
The two-person game has no score. Whoever sets the word just watches.
Build Log
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Build 1
The hidden word was fixed before the first guess and kept where nothing else in the game can reach it, so it can never be swapped to dodge your letters. Every word was checked against a list of 163 English and French words a public screen should never show, anywhere inside the word as well as whole, because a half-guessed word shows every run of letters it holds, and the right letters in a harmless word could otherwise spell something ugly.
Credits and licences
No third-party engine — it draws to a plain canvas. The typefaces it does use are embedded under the SIL Open Font Licence, with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Cover drawn from the game’s own sky, balloon and letter code.
Lift or Land is original work by Launchway Games.