Twofer Goofer

Hi Product Hunt! My name is Collin Waldoch and I made Twofer Goofer along with Arthur Wu and Sam Sweeney. A quick story… When Wordle was exploding in popularity last winter, I remember the narrative at the time as “what a brilliant and genius game.” In my head, I thought Wordle to be a well-executed iteration of a game I grew up playing. Sure, my childhood game was a pen-and-paper rendition named Jotto, but it was a classic family vacation pastime. And there’s a similar game that was even a TV Game Show in Holland!? The beauty of Wordle was not the novelty of the game, but the quality of the design and execution. It’s fun. It’s good-viral (not bad-viral). It captures that “aha moment.” etc. Anyhoo, I got to thinking: what are other games in my rotation for car trips and hikes? Immediately my brain went to Twofer Goofer! The general idea is to come up with a roundabout description for a rhyming two-word nonsensical phrase. I know I didn’t invent the idea of rhyming phrases. Newspapers had Wordy Gurdy, Jeopardy has Rhyme Time, board games have Think-it Link-it. But my brain-heart thought Wordle’s exquisite simplicity and virality combined with Twofer Goofer’s wordy weirdness (weirdy wordness?) would make for a sweet treat. So, I partnered with two folks I’d admired for a long time but hadn’t had the chance to work with. Arthur for design and Sam for engineering. We talked about building Twofer Goofer in February 2022. Life Stuff paused our discussions until July 2022. Then we got to work. We knew the core would be simple: a starting phrase that describes a Twofer Goofer (aka a pair of rhyming words). We knew we’d give you some hints you could access on-demand. But the biggest “add some spice! add some flavor! add some sense of self!” idea was, once solved, to give a daily illustration of that day’s Twofer. Inspo: the joyful creative bursts of Google Doodles circa 2008. Well, I started interviewing Upwork illustrators before quickly realizing the price for a daily custom illustration was going to break our non-existent bank. Behold and lo, I had just read about Midjourney and decided to play around with it. I won’t make this a treatise on these thinkpiece-sprouting generative AI art tools, but suffice it to say they are very cool, very powerful, and extra-very perfect for what Twofer Goofer is about: pairs of rhyming words that form nonsensical phrases. We playtested and twisted and bopped and pulled until we had something we were excited about. And this is it!

What a unique game! Congrats on the launch. 🎉

Figuring this out on the first try made me very excited, love this!