Wordle and its many, many clones – some of them pretty good games in their own right – has dominated the daily puzzle discourse for the past many months. But I’m glad to say that there is a new candidate in the daily word puzzle arena. I’ve been playing it all morning and I’m writing it as soon as possible so I can go back to playing it all afternoon.
It is called Knowwordscreated by Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger, and it’s like a mashup of crossword puzzles and anagrams, with a little bit of a Wordle-like puzzle. Unlike Wordle, it’s not free (it’s $ 12 on Steam, but 10% off until May 5th), but if you’re looking for something to add to your daily puzzle list, this could easily fit the bill.
Here’s a little trailer that gives you an idea of how Knotwords works:
You get a small, irregular grid of blank fields that you fill in with letters to form words that work both horizontally and vertically, like a crossword puzzle without clues. The grid itself is divided into segments, and in the corner of each segment you can see a group of letters that can appear in that segment. So you try to guess which words you can create by using only the letters in each grid segment, just like figuring out an anagram – and the difficult thing is that most words cross multiple segments. Like a crossword puzzle, the more words you discover in a puzzle, the more the remaining answers will be narrowed down, so while it can be quite challenging to start a puzzle, the easier it becomes, the more the puzzle will be solved.
Knotwords has a few elements you will not find in Wordle, and in my opinion the most important is a tiny rabbit in the corner of the screen, which gets completely freaked out when solving a puzzle. Who does not want to be cheered on by a happy little word-loving rabbit? Notice, Wordle, your stone-faced statements about Excellent and Impressive no longer cut mustard. I want a rabbit with floppy ears that loses its little sense when I find out where all the letters end up. The rabbit’s sounds make it even more fun, and his silly face also appears in all the performances. The elevator music soundtrack does not hurt the mood either.
The daily puzzles in Knotwords take a page from the New York Times crossword puzzle and gradually get bigger and more challenging as you get through the week. You can also visit the archive and solve any daily puzzles you missed from the current month. For example, I started playing today, but all of April’s daily puzzles are still available to me. Knotwords puzzles come in two variants: “classic” and “daily twist” puzzles, where vowels can only be used a certain number of times in each row and column. In the archive there are also “tricky” puzzles that only use adjectives.
Knotwords is also available for iOS and Android, where in-app purchases are free to unlock difficult mode, tips, and other features already included in the Steam version. You might try it on mobile first because it feels like it’s designed for a touch screen, even though the letters are sometimes a little too small for my eyes on a smartphone, especially in the larger grids. There are several options on the PC for your favorite “input style” so you can find a good mix of mouse and keyboard controls, whether you prefer to type your words or click letters with a mouse. Here is the website with links to whatever version you are interested in.