I’m on a one-man mission to destroy your productivity. Yesterday I offered you coded maps that will last you fifteen minutes of inactivity.
Today I’m offering Alphaguess, a browser-based puzzle game in which you have to guess the word. After each incorrect guess, the game tells you in alphabetical order whether the correct answer comes before or after it.
It took me 26 guesses and eight minutes to find today’s answer, which is not a result I’m proud of. You can head here and see if you can do betterand I bet you can.
My first guess today was “confusion” because I think it’s better to start with a word somewhere in the middle of the alphabet and immediately divide the space of possibilities in half. When I struggle, it’s usually because I’ve identified the first letter or two correctly and I start to lose sight of what’s in the realm of possibility and what’s beyond. But then I am both stupid and rebellious.
I regularly refer to works like Alphaguess, Wordle, and Scrambled Maps as puzzle games, but I’m not sure that fully captures their appeal. No outside thinking or deeper understanding of its rules is required to complete a round of Alphaguess. It’s fundamentally uncomplicated, your success is inevitable, and the outcome is only initially obscured because there are so many possible answers. It’s no different than when a friend asks you to guess what number between 1 and 1,000 they mean, and we wouldn’t call it a puzzle.
However, I find the process of finding the right word completely distracting, like playing… game with numbers during a long car trip, without having to leave home.
Credit to Caroline Cramptom Newsletterwhich linked up with both Alphaguess and Scrambled Maps last week.
