Zorse

NYT tries to keep the streak alive.

There’s been more news coming out of NYT’s digital department than just its recent strike and ongoing labor negotiations. There’s also Zorse, a game it’s been testing in Canada. If you’re Canadian, you might find it at https://www.nytimes.com/games/zorse; if you’re non-Canadian and curious, you can get the same style of game at Zorse-Game.com.

So what is Zorse? Well, it’s not too far off from Wheel of Fortune’s “Before and After” games…

…which have been a fixture in American living rooms for fifty years, inspiring numerous parodies and memes.

Zorse doesn’t work quite like Wheel of Fortune. Here’s what you’ll find on Zorse-Game.com right now:

The clue and filled-in spaces give you a reasonable chance of guessing the answer without having to reveal any more letters—and you can just write it in in that case. It appears there’s no limit to the number of phrases you can submit, but the interface will only tell you if you’re right or wrong, not which letters of your guess are correct.

If you can’t get it from that, that’s what the “Reveal Letter” button is for. The biggest distinction from Wheel of Fortune is that instead of guessing letters, you can ask the interface to uncover up to five letters. However, this can end up revealing more than five letters, because each time a letter is revealed, all other instances of that letter are also revealed. So if the answer were LION’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, and you had, say, _ _ _ _ ’S _ _ I _ E AND _ _ _ _ _ _ ICE, then clicking into the second word’s first letter and hitting “Reveal Letter” would give you

_ _ _ _ ’S P _ I _ E AND P _ _ _ _ _ ICE

My first try with the above puzzle was “TAKE THE HIGH ROAD TO NOWHERE,” which turned out to be incorrect. So I went to the first space in the last word and hit “Reveal Letter.” That told me the last word was S _ _ _ _ SS, so I filled in…

And I’m like… “I guess that works? High risk, high reward, maybe?”

The official Zorse game’s answers are a little better refined. Here’s an early one…

…although it only took a moment for me to guess STEAL THE SHOW AND TELL.

The official version lacks a “Submit Phrase” button, probably because it only needs you to enter the correct phrase before acknowledging you’ve got it right.

Will Zorse succeed? Will it even make it to American audiences? Hard to say. The stuff at Zorse-Game.com leaves me underwhelmed, but it links to similarly inferior versions of Connections and Strands, and the interface is a bit buggy besides, so it may not be the best indicator.

Can’t remember where I heard this, but someone I know observed that as a maker of games, the NYT is a little bit stuck trying to replicate the Wordle phenomenon. Connections and Strands are respectable efforts in that direction, and Zorse is like them and Wordle, in that it’s a new spin on a well-established game format.

Unlike Connections and Wordle, though, Zorse’s source material is a little too familiar to an American audience. And while Strands is based on a good old word find, it at least has the theme-revealing “spangram” feature to set it apart. Even if Zorse does end up STEALING THE SHOW AND TELL on its launch, I don’t think it’ll feel like it’s TAKEN THE HIGH ROAD TO SUCCESS.