Tag Archives: Word Games

A Wordle a Day Keeps the Burnout Away

Posted on by
Reply

If you’re like me, in the past few weeks your Twitter timeline has become a parade of yellow, green, and black-or-white squares all lined up in rows like Madeline and her schoolmates walking through the streets of Paris. Early on, I discovered that the squares were part of a game called “Wordle,” but I initially assumed that arranging the squares was itself the game, that there was some kind of subtle pattern creation at work. Plugging “Wordle” into a search engine led to trying to solve one Wordle puzzle, just to see what all the fuss was about, and that immediately led to making Wordle an essential part of my daily routine (just like Madeline’s daily walks).  

As demonstrated by those squares on Twitter—and by a recent flurry of news coverage— I’m not alone. Maybe you too are riding the Wordle wave, eagerly waiting for midnight, when you’ll be granted a new chance to deduce a secret five-letter-word. On the surface, the fact that we only get one Wordle challenge each day seems like it could be a point of frustration. In a pop culture landscape dominated by the model of “binging” media, we tend to always want more, more, more of what we enjoy. So why have so many people become riveted by a website that not only doesn’t ask for more than a little slice of your day but actively doesn’t allow you to participate for more than a single six-guess puzzle at a time? 

Sarah Demarest, a library youth services provider in western Massachusetts, theorized to me that our overfamiliarity with binging the latest trends is exactly why something like Wordle can catch on; a large part of its charm is its model’s rarity. She explained, “For me a lot of the appeal is in the fact that you can’t just play nonstop. You get a new episode every day.” Picking up on her television analogy, I pointed out that this meant Wordle was like a return to classic patterns of TV consumption, and she agreed, adding, “I have always been a strong believer that we need an equal mix of serialized and bingeable TV. But I have never thought about how that applies to other trends too.”

You watched Tiger King for five straight hours. Didn’t that bother you? Maybe!

A tweet by screenwriter Eden Dranger @Eden_Eats with more than 4,000 retweets and 44,000 likes places Wordle in a list of “Covid Eras” beginning with the Netflix documentary series Tiger King. Both have been pandemic sensations, topics of memes and group-chat conversations alike, but this shift from Tiger King to Wordle, taking Sarah’s theory into account, indicates that maybe we are seeing an overall shift from a passion for the bingeable to a passion for the serialized. At a time when so many of us are burned out for larger, heavier reasons than a pop culture trend, do we really need to be inviting more of that exhaustion into our brains?

The game’s creator, Josh Wardle, is conscious of how his site fits into our greater historical context, explaining on an episode of Spectacular Vernacular that the choice to remove attention-manipulating features like push notifications and endless play “had this effect where the game feels really human . . . And that really resonates, you know, [with] where we’re at right now in the world in light of Covid.” When we ourselves are so often, on Zoom, reduced to little squares on a screen, a different set of little squares on a screen has the ironic power to remind us of our humanity. After all, not being able to binge means having to move at the same speed as everyone else. We are all walking next to each other. 

A New York Times article about Wardle and his game states that the limit on one game per day “enforced a sense of scarcity . . . which leaves people wanting more.” There’s probably some truth to that, but in spite of what the creator of the copycat website Wordle Unlimited might think, maybe we’re just ready to pace ourselves instead of being deluged with constant streams of entertainment.

Pacing ourselves instead of binging is our philosophy when it comes to our Daily POP crosswords and word search puzzles. You know that we love pop culture enough to consume our favorite pieces of media for five—or twenty-six—straight hours ourselves. However, in this binging-saturated world, we’re happy to provide something steady and serialized for contrast. So, after you finish tweeting your Wordle squares for the day, why not hop on over to Daily POP and continue your slow-burn love affair with word puzzles?

Treat yourself to some delightful deals on puzzles. You can find them on the Home Screen for Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search! Check them out!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

Farewell, David.

Posted on by
2

The puzzle world is a relatively small one, and sadly, over the last month or so, it has grown a bit smaller.

I know some of you are already aware of the passing of Raymond Smullyan, the mathematician and puzzlesmith who popularized, among other things, the logic puzzle known as “The Lady or the Tiger?”

What you may not know is that a long-time member of the Penny Dell Puzzles family also passed recently.

david158aef32a50a5b

A Yale-educated lawyer, David Lindsey was a fixture at Penny Press for decades, but his influence on the world of puzzles extends back years before he joined that company.

The earliest editing credit I’ve been able to track down is a 1967 edition of Webster’s Crosswords, published by Merit, which is also one of the few publications where I’ve seen him credited under his real name. So, if you’ve ever enjoyed a puzzle credited to Dee Stewart or George Spelvin (a famous pseudonym from the American theater), you have David to thank for it.

Penny Press president Peter Kanter associates David with puzzles as far back as the early 70s, though it’s unclear when exactly David began working for Penny Press on a part-time basis. (I suspect it would have been around the time the Merit brand was acquired by Penny Press.)

img_20170309_142647758

He signed on full-time in 1987, and served as a puzzle editor, though perhaps his greatest legacy was the role he played in establishing its acquisitions department, the route by which outside puzzle creators and constructors could have their work featured in Penny Press magazines. David set quality standards for the puzzles that would be accepted, and served as the gatekeeper for all sorts of new puzzles.

He is also credited with creating or popularizing puzzles that are synonymous with Penny Dell Puzzles to this day. Secret Word, Chess Words, Chess Solitaire, Weaver Words, Diagramless Fill-In, Word Games Puzzles, and more flourished under his watchful eye and exacting attention to detail.

He would work the entire editing process, from concept to the final tweaks. At one point, David introduced a new type of puzzle in every issue of Variety Puzzles and Games, a Herculean feat.

His “Lindsey Lessons” — meetings where he would introduce and explain the nuances of puzzles — were invaluable to fellow editors, taking challenging puzzles like Word Math and making them more accessible, stripping away the mysteries that might have made them daunting to those who were unfamiliar with that sort of puzzling.

He even participated in a potluck-style puzzle group outside the office that would create and workshop new puzzle ideas together.

davidbday358b03746beb45

[A photo from David’s 80th birthday celebration.]

But when I asked people about David, it wasn’t his work in puzzles that left a lasting influence on them. It was his strong sense of self, a quiet confidence that he was who he was, uncompromisingly. He was at home with his choices, his quirks, and his beliefs.

There were stories about the injured coyote he cared for, stories about him jogging shirtless in winter, and stories about the snacks he brought into the office, the fruits of his many experiments with the food dehydrator given to him by members of a cardiac rehab exercise class he conducted.

David said, “I never eat sugar”, but curiously enough, he was always first in line when cookies or cakes were about.

He was never without one of his signature bowties, and he actually taught Peter Kanter how to tie one. (To this day, Kanter still uses the instructions David gave him, on the rare occasion he has to tie a bowtie.)

He was a pillar of his community, singing in a men’s chorus, participating in Daffodil Days events for the American Cancer Society, contributing recordings to some of the first Reading for the Blind programs, and even doing the Penguin Plunge well into his 80s to raise money for the Special Olympics.

It was my privilege to work with David for over a decade, and I’ll miss him very much. And I know that I’m far from the only one who feels that way.

Farewell, David.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

Other puzzles you might not know! (Volume 1)

Posted on by
3

We’re all puzzle fans here, right? And sometimes we need something new, something fresh and engaging to rejuvenate our love of puzzles. We know all the classics — crosswords, fill-ins, logic puzzles, word seeks, Sudoku, cryptograms, and anagram puzzles — but there’s a whole wide world of puzzles out there to explore that you might not even know about!

So, in today’s post, I’m going suggest some puzzles to check out, based on each of those classic solving experiences.

Let’s start with crosswords.

From the New York Times and LA Times crossword puzzles to the Penny Dell Crossword App, there’s no shortage of terrific crosswords of all difficulty ranges awaiting solvers.

But there are also some terrific variant crosswords for you to try out, like Double Trouble.

[Click here or on the grid for a larger version, complete with clues.]

In a Double Trouble crossword, you can put one, two, or three letters into a box, making for a more difficult solve that the standard one-letter one-box crossword.

But if you want to go a little farther afield, you can try something like Marching Bands.

[Image courtesy of Brendan Emmett Quigley’s website.]

A Marching Bands puzzle has two sets of clues. The first set clues the rows reading across, with two clues per line. But the second set is where things get interesting. See those alternating rings of light and dark shading? The second set clues words reading clockwise along those rings, or bands.

So instead of words meshing across and down, as in a standard crossword, you have across clues and band clues interacting to help you fill the grid. It’s a wonderful variation on familiar crossword rules, but one challenging enough to keep you interested. (For a more in-depth look, click here!)

But maybe you like crossword cluing but you’d like an answer more interesting than just a grid filled with words. Fair enough, have you ever tried Crostics?

[Click here or on the grid for a larger version.]

Crostics, also known as Anacrostics (from our friends at Dell Magazines) or Acrostics (as made by friend of the blog Cynthia Morris), feature a series of clues and letter blanks to be filled.

Those letter blanks each have coordinates assigned, so that when you fill the correct letters into those blanks, you’re also filling blanks in a grid below to spell out a bonus message, quotation, or anecdote. (It’s a one-to-one ratio, so each letter blank corresponds to a letter blank in the grid. If there’s one J in the message, you’ll find a J in the answer words.)

Although you don’t have the overlapping entries to help you puzzle out answers like crosswords or Marching Bands do, you can use the grid below as a solving aid. As each word in the message emerges, you can fill in those letters in the blanks above (using those same coordinates).

And for something along the same vein, you’ve got Word Games Puzzles.

[Click here or on the grid for a larger version.]

You still get the message reading out in a grid and the letter blank coordinates like in Crostics, but instead of a bunch of crossword-style clues, you instead get four mini-games to solve. One might be trivia or encryption, another might involve some wordplay, another might offer themed clues, and the fourth might be an anagram game.

Each will challenge you in different ways, and the use of repeated letters — a change from Crostics with their one-to-one letter blank to grid letter ratio — gives you more than one chance to fill in the final message.

Hopefully, one or more of these puzzles will pique your interests and offer a welcome new solving experience!

Next week, I’ll have recommendations for fans of Fill-In puzzles, and in future installments, we’ll tackle word seeks, logic puzzles, Sudoku, and more! If you’ve got recommendations for your fellow puzzlers, please let us know in the comments!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!