Twisteroo

Is compactness the soul of wit?

We’re snowed in as of yesterday morning. Janice plans to dig out today so we can get her back into the office by Tuesday. I have my doubts the roads will be cleared enough for that by then, but I’ll be backing her up regardless.

One of my favorite distractions in this moment is the game Twisteroo, a creation of Doug Beeferman, who along with his late father has been bringing us OneLook and RhymeZone. I’ve got plans to interview Beeferman soon, and I stumbled upon this while researching him.

The idea’s straightforward and admits a variety of difficulty levels. The puzzle gives you a Boggle-style grid and a famous saying. Users must arrange letters in the grid so that it can spell any word in the quote. Grids come in different shapes and sizes. Apologies for spoiling one of the puzzles, but I needed an example:

LANGUAGE has two A’s and two G’s, but this design only needs one of each. Trace the path (across, up, down, diagonally) and you’ll see you can spell out L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E. The other words are easier to arrange, but the U has to be in a spot where it can be part of V-I-R-U-S, and I and S need to be together too for this to work. Including A is a no-brainer, as it’s already part of LANGUAGE, but it’s still satisfying to see every word in the quote light up green.

Some grids do take multiple examples of the same letter to work—any word with a double letter like ALL or MIDDLE requires them. One strategy I hit on early is to put one of each letter from the quote in the grid and see if there are any leftover spots.

The first puzzle’s an easy warm-up just to get you acquainted with the game. There are about twenty-six puzzles in all (a few of them oddly repeated). If you’re looking for a diversion today, snowed in or otherwise, you could do worse!

I’m almost as intrigued by the qualities it takes to make a good Twisteroo. One needs certain patterns in the letter repetition that reward good matrix placement. Is it worth trying to look for those, or should you just try to put FRANKLY, MY DEAR, I DON’T GIVE A DAMN in the smallest box you can manage and go from there?

Well, it’s okay, but can we eliminate that duplicate N on a second pass?…

There we go!