Friends do not enthusiastically send me their black, yellow and green Wordle clusters longer. They no longer brag about how fast they completed the daily word puzzle, nor do they complain about how New York Times has rigged it completely to after buying it from its creator, Josh Wardle. Mostly, Wordle has joined the ranks of crossword puzzles and Words with friends like a glorified executioner, a pun you play when you remember it, just with a few fewer stars in your eyes.
Unless, however, you are a fan of puns like me, in which case you do not just continue to play Wordle daily with monk-like discipline, but all the buckets of “games like Wordle” are not enough to quench your painful pun. It’s not a problem –Josh Wardle himself recently recommended the game Knowwordswhich was created by developers Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger and released on April 28th. From one word freak to another, let me tell you, it’s a wonderful and artful experience.
The gameplay is easy, the game can be difficult
Or maybe I’m just stupid, which is also possible. If you play for free (the full version of the game, which you can buy for $ 4.99 a year or a one-time purchase of $ 11.99, adds puzzles, hints, your personal stats and color themes), a summer breeze- y Muzak nourishes you , when choosing between your two options: daily classic and beginning your monthly puzzle book with 30 puzzles.
But everyone Knowwords Puzzle uses the same basic gameplay. You can think of it a bit like an individual Scrabble games – each puzzle consists of several intersecting anagrams, and you need to arrange each anagram so that the whole board is legible. In the tutorial, for example, rearrange the letters into two linked, cluttered fragments, OW and RD, so that they end up being arranged as WORD.
The daily classic is of course something you can only play once a day, and it offers a more concise version of the word cards you find in the monthly puzzle category. Some puzzles in the monthly dump also have broad themes like “adjectives” and “uncommon words”, though I felt the puzzle answers were pretty similar across all free Knowwords boards.
That does not mean, however, that I was not charmed by them. I even struggled maybe, possibly, a little happily with them.
I embarrassingly had to use one of my limited tips, which is recreated every month, for the daily puzzle on May 2nd, which ultimately took me 47 minutes to complete. Do not make fun of me, I just could not process the word [redacted]. And anyway, the frustration I felt was the satisfying, push-your-little-head-to-the-border kind of frustration that you actually want puzzles to sprinkle you with.
But you do not have to shave part of your busy schedule to play Knowwords, either. Most of the free monthly puzzles took me about one to five minutes to complete and I could see myself returning to these during the day to get a hit of English serotonin. Corresponding to Wordlehow often you are able to unravel one Knowwords the arrangement is determined by how sweet your brain is and how much you like to solve benign problems.
Unlimited puzzles … at a price
Like I mentioned, you can play Knowwords free, but the full version is available as a subscription or a one-time purchase. Pay for Knowwords gives you a few perks, such as access to its archive and personal stats, but it upgrades you most exciting to tough mode through twist puzzles and “tricky” monthly puzzles.
I thought the twist puzzle was particularly nice – it’s a board that represents how many vowels there are in a section with numbers. So if there are two vowels in a column of five letters, this will be represented by a “2” at the beginning of the column. Each time you place a vowel in that column, the number of vowels will be used up until it reaches zero. Your goal is to get all the vowel numbers to zero by using the correct number of vowels while creating valid words.
Premium Knowwords let me also change my dictionary color to a Starburst pink, which was much appreciated, just like the white cartoon rabbit that pops up at the bottom of your screen and mumbles excitedly when you win. Although that guy is also available for free.
So you will not miss the most enjoyable or crucial aspects of Knowwords if you only play for free, but the more personal and harder paid version could be motivating for the tough word puzzlers among us. But no matter if you are a word game expert or a beginner looking for a stimulating daily game, I think you will enjoy the simple wisdom of a little Knowwords. Just do not tell me you spent less than 47 minutes on your daily puzzle.