Pleasant Diversions

My late grandmother loved crossword puzzles. When I lived with her during my undergrad days, she could often be found in her recliner with the newspaper, a pencil, and her crossword puzzle dictionary. We all have activities that help us unwind, and something I share with my grandmother is enjoying puzzles.

There are a plethora of word, logic, and other puzzles available online. You’ve probably heard of Wordle and others in the suite of New York Times games that are quite popular like Connections, Strands, Spelling Bee, and the like. Those are all satisfying and fun to play. But here are some other (maybe lesser known?) head scratching puzzle games that I have also enjoyed that you might too.

Bracket City – this one was recently purchased by The Atlantic. It was originally created by Ben Gross who still creates the puzzles. The puzzle consists of a “this day in history” phrase with some of the words replaced by clues in nested brackets, resulting in something that resembles a crossword in paragraph form. Some of the clues verge on the cryptic crossword end of things, leaning towards witty humour. You type your answers into a text box which automatically clears the solved bracket regardless of location (so you can bounce around the puzzle if you’re stumped). At the end, you are rewarded by a ranking and a historical factoid with a link to Wikipedia or another relevant source. You can also sign up for the Bracket City word of the day email for some vocabulary expanding fun.

Clues by Sam – created by Finnish game developer Ad Artis Oy, the game consists of a 4x5 grid of suspects. You are presented with an initial suspect already shown as innocent and a clue to determine whether further suspects are innocents or criminals. As you correctly determine the innocence (or lack thereof) of the suspects, you reveal more clues. The trick to this puzzle is you cannot guess. If there are not enough clues to support your answer, the game will not let you rely on a 50/50 chance of being right. You can use hints if you are super stuck, and you can play puzzles over again to try and follow the logic if you had trouble the first time.

CATfishing: the Wikipedia guessing game – This daily puzzle was developed in 2006 with the original concept credited to Sumana Harihareswara and developed into a game by Kevan Davis. The name of the game predates the current meaning of “catfishing” (using a fake persona online to deceive someone) and is a portmanteau of “category” and “fishing”. You are presented with 10 questions consisting of the categories that a Wikipedia article belongs to. Your job is to guess the title of the Wikipedia article. There is some wiggle room for spelling and phraseology, and even a “close enough” button for half points. If you are a fan of general knowledge trivia, this is a fun spin on that. I regularly get low scores on this game, but find it is fun to explore the different Wikipedia articles that come up.

Waffle – a word game created by James Robinson with a grid of 6 intersecting 5-letter words with their letters all jumbled. You solve for the words by swapping letters. You have 15 swaps to solve the whole puzzle and get bonus points if you have swaps left over. This is a great game if you like jumble-style puzzles. There is also a weekly deluxe puzzle of 8 intersecting 7-letter words with 25 swaps.

The Missing Letter – from Merriam-Webster of dictionary fame, where you solve a weekly set of daily crossword puzzles. Each clue starts with a letter of the alphabet, and at the end of each puzzle a letter remains. At the end of the week, unscramble the missing letters to solve a mystery word. If you like crossword puzzles and jumbles, this is the best of both worlds. Merriam-Webster also hosts a Wordle clone called Quordle, which consists of 4 Wordle-style puzzles solved simultaneously.

All of these games are free to play (ad supported), and don’t require you to sign up for an account. They are a pleasant diversion that gives your brain something to chew on, and all are easily found via your preferred search engine. Of course, you also don’t need to go online to search for puzzle games at all – there are still many puzzle books available to buy at your favourite book retailer if you prefer a pencil and paper.

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