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In a recent video in one of the New York Times social media accounts Tracy Bennet  the editor of the famous Wordle game, started answering a few questions from players of the game.

First question

I was crying the other day and started with teary and got it in 1, so solid advice tbh.

Tracy’s response: “Yeah I think the advices she’s referring to is that the first word that you think of  is how you feel and when sometimes you hit it on the first try, so its like a magical word. I love this story I’m gonna keep this one.”-she said after;

Second question

How does somebody become a digital puzzle editor?

Tracy’s response: “First of all just making puzzles. Then submitting them on various publications. Some will get accepted and some will get rejected. I also started in a publication… editing puzzles made by women and not binary constructors at Inkubator. And after a decade of doing that this job (refers to Wordle) became available at The Times. But even then it was kind of lucky that was in line to get a Game. And that is how I did it, I do not know how other people got their jobs(laughs). I think is just working in the field and pursuing your passions”.

Question 3

Aisle is my go-to word!!! eleminates/confirms half the vowels and S which almost always trips me up.

Tracy’s Response: “I think this is great. If you are gonna have that strategy where you use the same word every day that is a great start word and eventually A I S L E will be the word.

In this unique game you are an old man living by the sea in quiet solitude when an unexpected letter arrives to your home.

The Story

The mail brings concerning news with it, which makes you grabbing grabbing your walking stick immediately and this is how your journey begins.

The Landscape

You hike and trek through this quaint french countryside which presents some challenges as the hills and ridges are too daunting to hike for an old man.

But you gently push push and pull through the landscape like a  pottery master molding clay thus forming paths forward which bring you closer to your mysterious destination.

You will travel past sleepy villages and soaring cliffs when the sights spark something against your cowebbed mysteries unfolding a story of a long life marked by personal choices witu regrettabe consequences.

Old mans journey is a visual novel with light puzzle elements centered around the emotional and wordless story of chosing between love and personal passions and the ripples of effect that come as a result of those choices.

More than anything it makes you to reflect on your life and what truly keeps you anchored and happy.

This serene and poignant adventure is best enjoyed with a cup of chamomile tea the gentle floral notes are a perfect compliment to this calm and introspective inducing game.

• The game is around 8 bucks
• Game play is around 2 hours
• Available on Pc Switch Mobile Xbox and PS

 

The main goal was to guess an enigmatic 5letter word in less attempts as possible. With each guess the color of the tiles would change in order to shoq you how close you were to the actual solution. This gsme logic somehow resembled color guessing games like Master Mind.

Users were sharing their game completion grids which showed they played without revealing the solution for others.

The writter users community started noticing more and more people started posting green gray and yellow tile grids on their profile. On other social media platforms memefied or art pieces started to pop up that resembled this particular grid image. One some platforms like etsy or ebay mugs, caps and t shirts started appearing too. What was it? It was whats noq called the pandemic puzzle craze phenomenon Wordle.

Green meant the letter was in the right position.(ie on third letter)
Yellow meant the letter was contained in the word but not in that position
Gray meant the letter was not in the word at all and you were way off.

The game had only one answer for all people and there was only one puzzle available every day. Usually a very common English word. Every user had a maximum of 6 attempts to guess the correct answer.
 
The game experienced a rapid growth, the month it started it had like 90 players total then it had over 1 million players in less than 3 months.

Thi Nguyen, a professor teaching psychology at Utah University made a tweet that went viral. He theorized that social media presence of the game made it go viral.

But the cleverest bit about Wordle is its social media presence. The best thing about Wordle is *the graphic design of the shareable Wordle chart.* There's a huge amount of information – and drama – packed into that little graph.

— C Thi Nguyen (@add_hawk) January 12, 2022

He describes each Wordle puzzle as an “arc of decisions, attempts and failures.” 

James Ormond or OxygenGames announced that his game WordBox reached 1 million puzzles solved so far by the players of the game which at the moment is available on App store only.


In the OxygenGames newest creation WordBox Strands WordBox Wordsearch, you will be able to flex your word search capabilities as you uncover hidden words without having any helpful clue given to you at all. You will boost your vocab and refresh your spelling skills while playing it, and if playing alone isn’t what you prefer you can enter a competitive match and challenge a friend in a fierce word battle, if none if your friends is online you can also fire up a battle with a live player on the game network.

The game also has many modes and difficulty barriers. If you just want a light exercise for your brain you can do a plain themed puzzle, if you need a bit more challenge you can play the time racing puzzle and try to finish as much puzzles as you can within the given time frame.

The game design is a distraction free environment, with limited ads, and overall a pretty relaxing game experience. There is no limit on the number of puzzles you can play in a single day, so if your puzzle thirst is high on a given day you can play as much as you want.

So are you ready to take those grids and finish some of them to give WordBox a try? Go over to App Store to get the Wordbox game.

Mastering Word Salad Daily Puzzle game by Bleppo Games.

Word Salad is becoming popular as of late. It follows the logic of word forming games similar to Word Swipe or Wordscapes. You simply have to swipe in each direction to form words.

The Theme

The grid often comes in the size of 5 x 5 letters. To make it simpler for you to solve you have to be aware of the theme of the puzzle. So if you form a fish name, you may suppose the theme is related to fishing, the sea, or sea creatures. So after forming Herring you may look for a similar fish like TUNA, SARDINE or a topic related to fish for example, FISHERMAN, BOAT, NET, HOOK etc. The theme name is also displayed at the top of the grid, highlighted in Green.

How to determine length of the right words?

Since many different words can be formed out of the same set of letters, and those words can vary in length under the letter grid you will often see some small rounded number buttons. They represent the word length of the answer words you ought to discover. So if you see 5, 6, 4 – then you know you must try to form words that are 5 letters long, 6 letters long and so on.

Where to play it word salad?

The game is available to play in three ways.
1. On the web
2. As an iOS app
3. As an Android app

For a very long time, puzzles have been one of the only ways of entertainment family members or friends could engage in. Having no tv, no bars, clubs or tournaments it was obvious that puzzles were the only thing people could get fun out of. One of the oldest puzzles were word-riddles but some suggest ancient greeks and egyptians used maze drawings or labyrinths as a form of entertainment. Much later puzzles like the classic jigsaw or Sudoku number grid became popular. Classic or not the puzzles and the challenge they presented were satisfying brain teasers and often offered a sense of accomplishment to the winner.

Benefits for Brain Health

Beyond being an entertaining activity, studies, for some time have been evidencing the positive impact that puzzles have on ones cognitive health as long as it’s done in moderation and hasn’t turned into a mindless addiction.

You can think of the brain as a muscle, as such, it needs stimulation and exercise to remain in a good state and not shrink. Puzzle solving is no different than problem solving, and it is known that such activities provide mental stimulus that proves to boos cognitive abilities. It may also be able to maintain a healthy brain and delay or possibly avoid dementia later in life. If you constantly give your brain a work out, improve concentration, memory there is a great chance that you will not suffer from any decline.

Word Salad is a phenomenon that happens when a person, usually an elderly person is deprived of the ability to organize thoughts into correct phrases or sentences, something similar happens to people who get drunk or high on some substance. Word salads can also be made up words, or joined words that have no meaning when put together.

Grass Bear while those two words have meaning on their own, when put together they have no semantic meaning even though grammatically those are correct words. Together they result in a non sense phrase and whoever listens to it, is not able to comprehend whats being said.

The person engaging in a word salad speech may not be aware that the words are meaningless, instead they may feel like there is a significance to what they are saying, in reality the illogical sentences convey no meaning. Certain politicians have been noticed engaging in word salads.

Examples include:

Clanging

Where a speech pattern will follow a certain rhyming and other sound associations rather than following a coherent meaningful discourse.

Graphorrhea

This type is non verbal and it occours in written versions of word salads are rarely seen as opposed to logorrhea cases.

Logorrhea

People with logorrhea are known to engage in excessive talking often compulsive and not coherent.

Receptive aphasia

This variant is characterized by someone making fluent speeches but who lack meaning nonetheless, this could be the result of a stroke.