I’m looking at new Web-based word games these days, but I’ve still got love and loyalty for CineNerdle/Cine2Nerdle, and I’ll submit a puzzle to its system when the mood strikes. (You can find my archive here.)
One thing I enjoy about them is the flexible format. Tiles can represent actors, title fragments, character names, or concepts associated with the film, as in today’s original-flavor installment:
These create opportunities for wordplay, like the pairing of “angry” and “Ang Lee” and the ambiguity of “Fox” (actor name? character name? character species? title fragment? production studio?).
The variation I enjoy most, though, is something I call the name-action twist. I didn’t invent the format, but I was happy to pick it up. It goes like this:
The movies represented above are Man of Steel (purple), Avengers: Endgame (red), Interstellar (orange), Good Morning Vietnam (blue), and Arrival (green).
As you can see, most tiles use an actor’s name (or nickname, as in RDJ and Scarjo) in a sentence or phrase that…isn’t actually true. Kevin Costner didn’t die stifling his son’s potential—Kevin Costner is still alive today! But the character he plays in Man of Steel does die that way. The puzzle, therefore, relies on our media savvy. We can recognize real actors and the fantasy they’re selling at the same time.
On top of that, the descriptions vary in their directness. “Robin Williams does radio” sums up a lot of Good Morning Vietnam, but “Scarjo goes cliff jumping” is a dark understatement of the Black Widow’s fatal fall in Endgame. Here too is room for tongue-twisty wordplay (“Karen Gillian killin’ Karen Gillian”) and even a bit of metahumor (“Theater explodes,” “Rescuing Matt Damon was a mistake”—the latter a nod to Damon’s many roles as a rescue, as in Saving Private Ryan and The Martian).
Green tiles can rely on similarities between actors’ roles—Amy Adams bonds with Superman in Man of Steel and “Costello” in Arrival (“Abbott” doesn’t survive). The most rewarding name-action tiles only apply to a few films, though. “Jim Carrey makes a face” or “Harrison Ford fights” wouldn’t tell us much—while both actors have done quiet dramas, they have a lot of funny faces and fights on their respective resumes.
Name-action twist CineNerdles can also focus on a single actor, as in the grid below, referring to Tom Cruise movies Top Gun (orange), Edge of Tomorrow (purple), Collateral (blue), Magnolia (red), and Interview with the Vampire (green).
There are many actors named Tom, so the solver’s first job here is to figure out which “Tom” the tiles are talking about (and that they’re only talking about one). After that, the tiles offer a few more challenges. “Tom shoots aliens” suggests War of the Worlds, but Cruise’s character never actually shoots aliens in that one, just fights and flees them. His Collateral quote about “choice” might get some solvers thinking about Interview with the Vampire, but his line in that movie was “I’m going to give you the choice I never had.”
Tiles are limited to 39 characters, including spaces. That can make things tricky: the name Benedict Cumberbatch, with a space after it, takes up 21.
The tile here that gave me the most trouble was “Tom and his best friend are…close.” On its own, it almost captured, but didn’t quite capture, the homoerotic undertones a lot of viewers perceived in both Top Gun and Interview with the Vampire. When I realized I could add a rainbow-flag emoji 🏳️🌈, everything fell into place. In designing puzzles and solving them alike, the joy is in the challenge.