I’m a sucker for a good word puzzle or game. Traditional crosswords are not really my thing but luckily people in the Internet are really creative. I’m collecting my favourites here.
Tiled Words
Tiled Words is a crossword-esque puzzle game where each day, you get a puzzle with a theme and clues for words to solve across and down. Letters to use are provided in tetrominos that you need to move around, rotate and combine to create a solution that satisfies every clue.
The clues provide a direction (across or down), a description and the length of the word. You also get an option to reveal a word. Every day, you get up to 3 reveals and once a word is revealed, you know what it is but you still need to solve it on the board.
If you get a word correct but using incorrect pieces, the game will tell you that and reveal the word so you don’t forget it.
At the end of a day, you get a stats page that shows how long it took you and how many reveals you used.
Reunion
Reunion by Merriam Webster is a cute word game that offers daily puzzles.
It consists of a board and requires you to solve it by swapping two letters at a time. When a letter is in a correct position, it will lock it in place and color it green. If a letter is in a correct row or column but not in the right place, it’ll be shown as yellow.
To solve the board, the cute mascots of the game, a fox and a hedgehog will end up next to each other so that can be used as an extra hint.
The game is scored by the amount of swaps made. Words can be between 3 and 7 letters long.
Word Play
Word Play is a roguelike video game by Game Maker’s Toolkit that has taken a lot of inspiration from Balatro and Scrabble.
In the game, you’re given a grid of letters with point values and you need to combine them into words to score games. Each round, your goal is to beat the round score and between rounds, you can purchase score modifiers and abilities that help you increase your points to match increasing targets.
The creator, Mark Brown, has made a couple of videos about the development of the game in his Youtube channel, for example How I Made Word Play.
Relaatiot
Relaatiot is a word association game in Finnish.
The game is about making word associations and connections. You start each “level” with a single word on a single screen. That word then has a bunch of connected hidden words or phrases and based on the association and character counts for each word in those phrases, you need to figure out those words to reveal more. Once you solve a word at an edge of a screen, next screen is revealed and the puzzles spread out to grids of screens.
It’s a deviously challenging puzzle that requires wide knowledge and even lateral thinking of various topics. That challenge on the other hand provides such a great feeling when you figure it out. These puzzles are not something you’d usually solve in one session but can take days or weeks of letting the ideas float in your subconscious to figure out.