Long Story Short

About Long Story Short

Long Story Short is a small daily game about editing. Each day there is one sentence, often a full little story with adjectives and side details, and your job is to reduce it to a five-word headline using only words that appear in it. You tap five words and submit them as a guess.

Feedback works in the style of Wordle, but for whole words: a tile shows whether a word is in the right spot, in the headline but in the wrong spot, or not in it at all. You have five tries. Afterwards you can tap each word to see why it stayed or went, and read the whole story behind the sentence. The guiding rule from the game: little words like 'the' and 'was' never make it, and a feeling, a count or how something started only stays if that is the event.

The free daily sentence is the main game. A paid Hard mode ($3 a month or $30 a year at the time of writing) adds a second, longer story each day with only three tries. People can also buy a gift day or a sponsor day, sending in a story that becomes the day's sentence, and those days stay in the archive. The game is made by sheets.works, a small data-storytelling studio.

It suits players who like word games about meaning rather than spelling, and anyone who enjoys trimming copy.

How to play Long Story Short

1. Read the day's sentence.
2. Tap five of its words, in order, to form a headline that keeps the meaning; tap a word in a box (or press Backspace) to take it out.
3. Press Guess and read the colours: right spot, wrong spot or not in it.
4. Adjust and try again, with five tries in all, then tap words to see why each stayed or went.

Tips

• Drop articles, auxiliary verbs and most adjectives first; they almost never survive.
• Look for who did what: the subject, the main verb and the object usually make up most of the five.
• Feelings, numbers and backstory only stay if they are the actual news of the sentence.
• Use a wrong-spot result to reorder rather than swap out a word.

Questions