When Josh Wardle created and released Wordle in 2021, it quickly took the world by storm. Since selling the game to the New York Times, Wardle has been pretty quiet on the gaming front.
He's back with a new, trickier word game — Parseword. Built with collaborators, Parseword attempts to make cryptic crosswords easier to...parse.
"Cryptics are beautiful and rich puzzles but are notoriously hard to learn," the game's about page reads. "We wanted to make a game that captures the joy of solving cryptics while making them more accessible to everyone."
I'm not familiar with cryptic crosswords, but according to the Parseword site, the puzzles remove the ambiguity of clues in a normal crossword with a clue that "validates itself." The clue itself is the puzzle.
Parseword eases the difficulty of cryptic crosswords with tutorials, starter puzzles, and helpful videos. If you find yourself stuck, there is a hint button to give you some direction.
The game launches at an interesting time as the New York Times continues to expand its offerings from the crossword and Wordle to Strands, Connections and Pips.
Parseword may not take the world by storm as Wordle did, but it's not meant to either. “Releasing Parseword is happening more on my own terms, instead of happening to me,” Wardle told the New Yorker.
How to play
As mentioned, the Parseword site is very beginner-friendly. The tutorial is quite generous, and there are videos with explanations and starter puzzles that teach you different ways to solve.
There are a number of different keywords to understand, from "replacements" to "containers."
The game itself, like Wordle, is a daily puzzle. It has three different game modes: learn mode, play and challenge.
Learn mode provides definitions for words and keyword suggestions that give a hint on how to solve the puzzle. There's also the hint button. Play mode hides the definition and features no starting hints. Experienced solvers can try challenge mode, where the solution length and indicator information are hidden.
The puzzle will provide you with a series of words like curse, blade, catching and clothes from today's (March 10) puzzle. Essentially, you are trying to create similes.
In today's example Curse is the word you want to match. You can replace words like blade with another say 'sword' and clothes with 'wear'. You can also combine words into a "container".
So Sword catching Wear turns into Swear word, which is analogous to a curse.
It may not be intuitive, it wasn't for me, but you need some cleverness and learning the keywords of how you can combine and replace words to reach the end result.
Fortunately, the entire project is designed to help you learn over time and get better at the game as it introduces its concepts and terminology.
