MacGougan at Large

Notes on Word Puzzles - 3

Making Puzzles Harder

Your serious puzzler wants a challenge. It’s not as satisfying, somehow, if a puzzle is too easy. Ideally, a puzzle should appear impenetrable at first, then slowly give way to the puzzler’s relentless logic.

My brother seeks out particularly difficult puzzles, including “rescue” versions. This refers to a Wordle-like puzzle that comes to you having already been started badly on purpose - making it harder to complete successfully within the allotted number of turns.

Part of my own admittedly neurotic bedtime routine is to play five rounds each of two iPad games made artificially more difficult - just to see which is more beatable that night.

One is Jumbline, where you’re given seven letters and need to rearrange them to make words within two minutes. Under the normal rules, your turn continues so long as you make at least one word that includes all the letters. Under the Neurotic MacGougan Bedtime Rule, a round only counts as won if I’ve completed every word the game deems as valid.

The other game is Unblock It, where you’re given a rectangle with blocks of various sizes, some that can move up and down and others that can move left and right. There is a colored left-and-right block that needs to escape from the rectangle out of an exit on the right side. Under the normal rules, your turn continues so long as you can get the colored block out of the exit. The Neurotic MacGougan Bedtime Rule is that a round only counts as won if the colored block is ultimately freed in one swipe across the entire width of the rectangle, from the left side to the exit on the right side.

In theory, every Jumbline round is possible to win with the NMB Rule. As a practical matter, however, some letter combinations generate so many possible words that it’s very hard to finish them all within the allotted time.

Unblock It has no time limit, but not every round is possible to end with a single, final, side-to-side swipe. So there’s a significant element of luck here. Still, on any given night, Unblock It is a modest favorite to be NMB-beaten more times out of five tries than Jumbline.

Note, by the way, that I’m never the loser. One game or the other wins or else it’s a tie. Sorry to be so detailed about this little bizarre ritual, but I’m hoping to provide inspiration for other neurotic game-players that such things can be admitted to.

Is there anything else in our lives that we deliberately make harder? Does anyone toss money away to make balancing the budget more challenging? Or poison themself to be eligible for a “rescue” version of healthy eating?

One example I can think of is exercise. People who are seriously into fitness can be eager to add more weight or crank up the resistance. I can, for example, imagine someone deciding that a jog around the neighborhood would be enhanced by putting on a backpack full of rocks.

I just can’t imagine myself deciding such a thing.