I miss the height of Wordle mania not because of the game itself, which I still play from time to time, but because of the torrent of delightful, experimental browser puzzles that followed it. Worldle, Octordle, Moviedle, Waffle, Who Are Ya?, Cloudle and many, many others are a gold rush among jumpers that I was fully on board with.
Scrambled Maps takes me back to the good ancient days. It has little in common with Wordle, but it is a browser-based puzzle game that offers one recent challenge every day and is an equally great diversion.
The challenge is elementary: a map of a part of the world is divided into 18 equal-sized squares and scrambled. You have to reconstruct them by solving puzzles consisting of roads and rivers, railway lines and place names.
This is more tough than it might seem at first glance. Maps have no edges, corners, blue skies, or simple jumping-off points known to a dedicated discologist. Instead, you match colored roads, building complexes, and green fields, then look at the road shapes and text.
While putting together my first puzzle, I found tile after tile that connected to each other, but I found it more tough to arrange those tiles in the bigger picture. Did two tiles that clearly fit together go into the top right corner, bottom left corner, middle, or…? Only after 25 minutes did I realize that I had built the map perfectly, but in two inverted halves: the nine tiles on the left belonged to the right and vice versa.
When I fixed this problem by placing each tile in the correct position, a green box appeared around each tile. Ah. The game confirms correct answers throughout the game. Useful.
Like Wordle, no encrypted map seems really tough, just more or less time-consuming. Like Wordle, it would be simple to cheat by visiting OpenStreetMap (the map data source) or Google Maps. Anyway, like Wordle, I’m addicted and eagerly await each recent puzzle.
You can play Encrypted Maps here.
