Word Games & Puzzles - Where To Play...
Recommended Reading
Word Game Analysis & Strategy
As you may suspect from the masthead on our Blog, word game strategy and analysis is a subject of keen interest around here. Most of our hardcore "R&D" projects involve writing a Python program to crunch through data about words to understand things like the difficulty of guessing a hangman word, the expected point value of a scrabble hand, or the largest number of words which are direct anagrams of each other. If this type of analysis is of interest to you, you may enjoy reading about:
Puzzle Construction Tools
Free Online Picture PuzzlesOptical Illusions
Another area we enjoy is optical illusions. Solving a good puzzle involves moving the elements of the puzzle around to find the proper order. Designing a great puzzle for others to solve requires an awareness of the blind spots in the mind and the ability to use them appropriately to guide the viewer past that which you do not wish them to see. One of the more interesting aspects of our article on the best words for Hangman was the relative ubiquity of the hard words - they were hidden in plain sight, obscured by a statistical trick. Optical illusions are puzzles for the eye and leverage the same concepts we use in designing puzzles and cryptograms. Here are some optical illusion sites to get you started. Enjoy!
Places to Play
We've started compiling a list of major sites where you can play the word games we analyse on this site. In terms of online word games, Zygna is the big dog in the space, with offerings for audiences interested in Scrabble, Boggle, and Hangman. I've also seen a lot of interest in 5x5 Boggle recently - here are three sites which have attracted a decent following.
Boggle
5 x 5 Boggle
Hangman
Scrabble
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