A WayWord puzzle encodes a phrase into a simple grid of letters. Players are given the grid of scrambled letters, a hint in the form of a title, and the phrase itself below, with all the letters replaced with dashes. A WayWord puzzle always starts in a corner to make the early steps of solving less difficult, and from there players draw a path connecting letters one at a time either orthogonally (up, down, left, right) or diagonally, using each letter once. Write the letters in order on the dashes below the puzzle, and if they line up to make a real phrase aligning with the hint, you’ve solved the puzzle!
I’m personally happy with WayWord for two main reasons:
First, there are so many small ways to vary difficulty! You can make the hint obscure or obvious, wind the path in more confusing ways (and you can even make certain words harder to uncover than others by twisting them more sharply), and, depending on the size of your phrase, a WayWord puzzle can take anywhere from 3 minutes (3x5 grid) to an hour (12x10 grid) for an average puzzler to solve.
Second, WayWord puzzles are ridiculously simple to create (notice how I used “your” in the mini-paragraph above). All you need to make one is a phrase where the number of letters can be divided into two numbers each greater than two. That’s because the dimensions of the grid should be at least three by three, since having an effectively flat line makes for a very boring puzzle. Just start in a corner, and make a path filling in the squares one at a time! Write the appropriate number of dashes below, and if you’d like, add a small hint, usually about the topic the phrase covers. And you’re done!
Fun fact: the hour long, 12x10 puzzle took me about five minutes to make. That means for every minute I invested into making the puzzle, players were able to spend 12 minutes solving it, and based on the feedback I received, they enjoyed the longer puzzle, trying to intuit where the phrase would lead next!
WayWord’s been in some super cool places! For about a quarter of the school year in 8th grade, I made a puzzle every week to be posted in my math teachers’ classroom. If my classmates solved it, they got candy, and I did my best remaining anonymous so nobody would get answers out of me. It turned out to be very popular, and over 100 puzzles were solved during its brief appearance! WayWord has also been featured in the Belmont Voice, my town’s local newspaper. You can try it for yourself here! (PDF)
There’s a simple beta online – available upon request! Send me an email to request beta access and I’ll shoot you the link!
If you’ve got an interest in featuring WayWord somewhere for whatever reason, shoot me an email to let me know, and I’d be more than happy to help you out!