Hello. It may be a symptom of my immedicable brain worms that when I immerse myself in a particular puzzle format its strategy seems to take over how I view the world, and it jolts me when people experience or solve things differently.
I enjoy Wordle because it is so similar to many wordgames I have played or conjured over the years. But…
what is this?
In the last decade or so I’ve gained an interest in cryptic crosswords, a type of puzzle where the rules are so intertwined with the clue and solution that it can seem impenetrable to outsiders—try following
Stella Zawitowski if you want to learn more about how to approach the format. Each week Stella puts out clues to be solved as well as a solution for which she solicits clues. I am taken aback by the different ways people do the latter, even for short, everyday words—
here’s a recent example.
More recently I have been knee-deep in nonograms. These are logic games that are visually and procedurally at the intersection of crosswords, sudoku and Minesweeper. The puzzle is an empty grid, with each square either left blank or filled in according to clues for each row and column. Once complete the grid reveals a picture of an object. For example, a 9x9 grid might have a row marked with the clue ‘2, 4’. This means that in that row of nine squares, there is a run of two consecutive filled squares and a separate run of four filled squares. All other squares are empty. You get a clue like this for each row and each column, and you use logic of the row-column intersections to complete the grid and get your image of a bottle of sake or whatever.
Without resorting to mathematical brute force there are a limited number of techniques to solving the puzzles, so it’s not like you can compare strategies with others as with some other puzzles and games. The interesting thing for me is that when solving a puzzle I enter a flow state unlike with almost anything else. I can zip through smaller grids, filling squares at rapid pace based on pattern matching with my previous experience without ever consciously thinking about it. With larger, more complicated grids I can sit there for extended periods of time, working through permutations and carrying potential contradictions in my head while time bends and distorts and suddenly it is two weeks later and I haven’t slept or eaten.
If this sounds remotely appealing (except the dereliction of personal and familial care) then try looking for games with ‘nonogram’ or ‘hanjie’ or ‘picross’ in the title. You’ll likely find them on any platform or app store. I play Jupiter’s
Picross series on my Switch (they are also available on the DS family of consoles). If you have a Switch online subscription, you can also play an older Japanese game,
Mario’s Super Picross, for free using the
SNES application. There is a small amount of Japanese text but
it isn’t a problem.
In the time it’s taken me to write this, my friend mentioned in the first link has progressed his Wordle puzzle by a further letter. There truly is
no wrong way to play.
