My family is no longer limited to Wordle, the daily five-letter word puzzle that requires six guesses. We also like Worldle, a geographic version that requires a country to be identified.
And maybe there are other options to explore.
I love Wordle’s background: Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer living in New York City, invented it as a block game for his partner who loves word quizzes. Wardle released it to the world in October 2021, after obsessively playing it and then sharing it with friends and family.
By Christmas it had become an international phenomenon. In January, The New York Times acquired Wordle for an undisclosed seven-figure sum, but so far it has remained free and fully accessible.
British author Patricia Nicol has compiled a selection of the best puzzle books, including Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and SJ Watson’s thrilling thriller Before I Go To Sleep.
I can take or leave Sudoku, but I love Wordle, crosswords, spelling, and competitive word games like Scrabble and Bananagrams. Quizzes too.
Many fictions have a puzzle element. Especially detective novels are based on discovering and following clues.
Gillian Flynn is one of the writers who likes to scatter breadcrumbs around to mislead her readers.
Her best-selling book, Gone Girl, is told by two unreliable storytellers. One of them, Amy, is obsessed with exams. She wrote them for a living and designed elaborate treasure hunts for her husband, Nick, she.
But when he suddenly disappears, is it a treasure hunt or an abandoned trap?
Another super-tense thriller is SJ Watson’s Before I Go To Sleep. The hero suffers from anterograde amnesia. Every day she wakes up not knowing who she is and tries to rediscover her identity through her diary. But is it sometimes deceived?
Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore is the story of a technician who takes a job at an eccentric bookstore but is fired to discover that the dusty volumes contain jealously guarded information and lead him to an ancient secret society.
Take some time for yourself this week to enjoy a satisfyingly complex puzzle.
Source: Daily Mail
