Cine2Nerdle: Beyond Movies (4 of 4)

Broadening the tile canvas.

T Campbell

May 28, 2023

Is anything necessarily “cinematic” about the Cine2Nerdle format? Imagine a TVNerdle:

Answers (vertical answer last): CSI, Squid Game, Community, Batman, and The Masked Singer. TMS has judge Robin Thicke and uses the same theme tune as CSI did. Hope The Who are enjoying those residuals!

I also like the names “West and Ward,” which look like directions here but actually mean Adam West and Burt Ward.

Books are usually single-creator items, without names like actors and directors to invoke. Nevertheless, filling out a “BookNerdle” is not too difficult. I’m limiting myself to 1x4 examples in the interests of time, but 2x3s also feel feasible.

Answers: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Bonus wordplay: Griffin and Marvel are character names in Wells’ novel, not genre clues for fantasy or superhero stories. And the “new wave” tile refers to new-wave science fiction, not new-wave music.

(I tried to include a “race” book that was about racing rather than race relations, for another punny twist. But I couldn’t really find one that felt well-known enough. On the Road is the closest I could get, and all the fast driving in that story isn’t really racing anything but the characters’ own ennui and mortality.)

And beyond? Could the “-Nerdle” format work for any subject? What about a RecipeNerdle, crossing an orange pumpkin pie with a red punch flavored with orange peel? A HistoryNerdle could cross the phrase “Yankees go to war” to describe both World War I and the Civil War, playing on the more specific meaning that “Yankees” has in Atlanta, as opposed to London. Maybe an AutoNerdle could cross the Model T Ford with Tesla and its T logo? That one’s on my mind lately, for some reason.

There are a few limits to this kind of expansion. There has to be a base of users who know the subject, its examples, and those examples’ traits. Some interests are just too niche to please more than five or ten people—although a Nerdle could be worth it, if those five or ten really wanted it. Cine2Nerdle is aimed at the film lover’s community: a number-theory Nerdle probably wouldn’t have gotten the same reach.

And the examples need a variety of distinct traits, traits that can overlap (or seem to, when carefully described). Insurance companies, despite their colorful ad campaigns, aren’t usually distinct enough in reliably consistent ways to make good Nerdle fodder.

Still, the potential is vast, and not just for games.

Using Nerdles as a classroom exercise can push students to think in new ways about the material. In business, a Nerdle could isolate the best traits from established different ventures or programs, traits one could then bring together into more efficient initiatives. Science, faith, art…all of them benefit from visualizing traits in common and the distinct traits that, when put together, make a thing unique.

When you get down to it, a Nerdle is a tight-focused sort of Venn diagram, and Venn diagrams have been doing the same things—in many fields—for well over a century.

The Venn Diagram: How Overlapping Figures Can Illustrate ...

Nilanth Yogadasan recently opened Cine2Nerdle up with a more direct user submission interface. This has wildly increased the number of puzzles available: upon release, users could play about 220 games, but now it’s well over 500 (and counting). Time will tell how this deluge of bonus material will affect the game, but I suggest a follow-up:

Let users create non-movie Nerdles for other purposes, with a changeable header for the topic.

Such interactivity would have the same potential problems as the rest of the internet, and Yogadasan is already policing the current submissions for abuse. But allowing multiple topics seems like the surest route to the game’s full potential. If that happens, I’ll be prepared to release this GameNerdle: