Long Story Short

Long Story Short displays a daily sentence, long and chatty, then a brutally clear instruction: keep the five words that still tell the story. Below the sentence, five empty slots wait, and beneath the slots, every word of the sentence is shown one by one as clickable chips, articles and prepositions included. You tap five of them to fill the slots, then tap Guess. A permanent legend occupies the bottom of the board with its three states, right spot, wrong spot and not in it, and the top banner offers a Stats button, while the footer lines up How to play, Archive and Feedback.

1. Read the daily sentence, displayed in bold above the slots.
2. Tap five words among the chips showing the sentence: each tap fills the next slot.
3. Press Guess to submit the five words.
4. Read the colors shown on each slot and correct the selection, within a limit of five attempts.

It's a trimming game, not a guessing game, and that nuance is enough to set it apart. You don't look for a hidden word; you decide what a sentence can lose without dying, which amounts to doing the work of a copy editor on the daily sentence. Feedback by position adds the second layer: knowing which words survive is not enough, you must also find the order in which they stand. And since everything is played by tapping chips, a round is settled in a few gestures, with no keyboard or typing.

Correction is done slot by slot and not just word by word, that's the whole point: the demo on the welcome screen, titled "Keep the five words that still tell the story", shows a garish row where blue marks a word in the right position, orange a word that indeed belongs to the solution but is placed elsewhere, and pale gray a word to discard. The same legend remains permanently displayed under the board, which avoids reopening the rules during a game. Keyboard presses produce nothing, which is consistent with a game entirely driven by tapping the chips.

Core play

The page offers a single daily puzzle: a bold sentence above five empty slots and a set of clickable word chips (articles and prepositions included). You tap five chips to fill the slots, then press Guess; a permanent three-state legend (right spot, wrong spot, not in it) shows feedback and the welcome demo and instruction note a limit of five attempts. All interaction is driven by tapping the chips (no keyboard), and the site layout (Stats button, How to play, Archive, Feedback) shows no alternate play modes.

• Orange is the forgiving color: the word is part of the solution, it's simply misplaced. Before swapping out words, trying to change their order is often the cheaper option.
• Nothing is typed. The instruction under the board is explicit: you can only choose words from the daily sentence, which closes the door to synonyms and any rephrasing.
• Function words, articles and prepositions, are offered like the others in the chips. They count toward the five; you must decide whether they really hold the story together.