Here’s a Cine2Nerdle I did that was much better received than any I mentioned in the last installment…and yet it’s every bit as show-offy as they were:
This is a “reverse” Cine2Nerdle, meaning that instead of organizing sixteen traits to represent five films, you organize sixteen films by five common traits. In the above example, the traits are mentally ill protagonists (blue), coming-of-age stories (purple), talking animals (red), horror movies (orange), and movies based on comics (green).
The show-offy part, as you may have noticed, is that all of these movies share an additional trait: they all have the word “bird” or a common bird name in their names.
I fretted these movies might be too obscure, and that the comic-book origins of the green ones might be unknown. The Birds of Prey is a long-running DC Comics property and Howard the Duck is a Marvel property, but The Crow was an obscure indie project and White Bird is a literary graphic novel.
But for the most part, readers seemed to like the puzzle fine. And if the show-offy aspect didn’t get me any gold stars, it didn’t seem to hurt me, either. And this puzzle did even better:
Solvers seemed to like the minimalism. “To infinity and beyond” is from Toy Story, while “To be or not to be” is from Hamlet. The other three titles—Infinity War, Harold and Maude, and Star Trek Beyond—are referenced more directly.
Beyond my own efforts, what’s the most popular Cine2Nerdle entry there is? That’s subject to change, but as I write this, this is the most popular user-submitted puzzle, playing off The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Fantastic Four, Batman and Robin, The Incredibles, and Zootopia.
This one has several flourishes, from the unusual tile structure (all the green tiles describe the same character; all the other tiles describe four different characters) to the use of similar films Fantastic Four and The Incredibles.
The most-liked entry from the creator himself is an early effort in the “reverse” field:
These movies are grouped by roles for Natalie Portman and Jim Carrey; days of the week in the title, Paris settings, and iconic masks, respectively.
From this limited data, we can conclude that clever ideas work just fine, as long as they're not the sort that alienate the solver. But what alienates and what doesn't?
That's a subject that needs more data to fully resolve. But just as some my puzzle themes are innovations in terms of making things easier and not harder, so too can that principle work here.