The creator of Wordle has returned with another word game based on cryptic crosswords, and it’s completely free to play.
Wordle was one of the most popular puzzle games of recent years, following its launch in October 2021, to the point where it was sold to The New York Times just a few months later.
The key to its popularity was its simplicity. In Wordle, you have to guess a five letter word using feedback from coloured tiles. It was created by Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle, who has now returned with a new free-to-play puzzle game which is far more complex.
Parseword aims to simplify cryptic crosswords to make them more accessible. ‘Cryptics are beautiful and rich puzzles but are notoriously hard to learn,’ a description on the game’s website reads. ‘We wanted to make a game that captures the joy of solving cryptics while making them more accessible to everyone.’
There are tutorials and videos to help you understand the concept, but you’re essentially trying to solve a crossword where the clues are baked into the words you’re presented with. In one example, you’re asked to find another word for ‘fee’ from ‘taxi reduced’. By tapping on the latter, you can make ‘tax’ – a reduction from ‘taxi’ as it eliminates the last letter.
In other examples, you have to replace words with synonyms to match another word from multiple options, or perform a reverse where, in one example shown in the tutorial, you flip the word ‘won’ to ‘now’.
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Most of the daily puzzles require multiple steps to solve, combining synonyms, performing a reverse, reductions, and other manoeuvres involving anagrams and homophones.
There are various difficulty levels to ease you into Parseword, and while it is hoping to make cryptic crosswords more accessible, it’s clearly not aspiring to have the same broad appeal as Wordle. Even the tagline describes it as a ‘tricky wordplay game’.
In an interview with the New Yorker, Wardle said he hopes to ‘reduce the problem space for new solvers’ with Parseword. In light of Wordle’s success, which he himself described as ‘a little overwhelming’, he’s also seeing it as a more manageable proposition.
He added: ‘Releasing Parseword is happening more on my own terms, instead of happening to me.’
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