So here’s what I offered Cine2Nerdle when my excitement got away from me. Instead of a 1x4 or 2x3, this one’s a 3x4, with seven movies instead of the usual five. All twelve of the top squares are crossing squares, each referencing two films. That’s Apollo 13, Back to the Future Part II, and Avengers: Endgame across, with Hollow Man, 13 Going on 30, Space Jam: A New Legacy, and Cast Away going down.
I played it safe setting this up, using actors with long careers that I knew well. I started with Kevin Bacon, who’s got so many collaborations there’s a party game based on them, and Josh Brolin, who’s been central to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and so has likely worked with everyone else.
I didn’t use as much wordplay in the crossings as you might’ve expected. Most squares were real people, plot points, or title words. But there was another title/setting shared square, “space.” And a sort of shared quotation, “…Doc,” a frequent sentence ender for both Bugs Bunny and Marty McFly of the Back to the Future films.
And I’m pretty proud of “Fox,” the last name of Marty’s portrayer and a studio name for Cast Away. That kind of crossover is rare, and the few other contenders—Vivica A. Fox, David Warner, and Julie Warner—can’t compare to Michael J. Fox’s fame at his peak. (And nobody’s named Olivia Columbia or Bobby Paramount.)
My original ideas for this grid were even more insane: I wanted to submit a 4x4, featuring eight movies…and hey, maybe a couple more in diagonals? Why not. But—um—turns out doing even seven is very hard. I could probably have managed eight if I gave it another day or two, but I figured I should see what Nilanth Yogadasan thought of the seven-movie version before burning any more oil on this.
My caution was well founded. As Nilanth patiently explained, his system wasn’t designed to handle more than five movies at a time. It’d be near-impossible to shuffle things so that a solver wouldn’t “get” some movies immediately, yet they’d need more turns than the game had to have a fair chance at getting all seven.
Nilanth did allow for the possibility of adjusting his app to make this one worth playing (in which case, um, spoiler warning?), but that doesn’t seem in line with the direction he’s taken since.
That’s the way it goes, experimenting. You use the data you get, but it doesn’t always lead right to a product.
On the other hand, sometimes it does, even when you’re not trying for that. The grid below was first to depart from Cine2Nerdle’s formula by listing movies in the tiles instead of traits, inviting the solver to group them by the traits they had in common. Nilanth ran this puzzle as an April Fool’s gag, hoping it’d go over well.
Did it ever. Within a month, the site started running two kinds of puzzles, one in the original format and one in this new, “reverse” format. Wordplay entered some of the reverse puzzles too, which could be grouped by such superficial aspects as “titles with days in the year” or “title with planets” (as in the first two columns below).
But I think the format has even more potential. Almost unlimited potential, really. What kind of potential?
The potential…to supply me with the concluding part of this series! Tomorrow.