I have always liked word games. I remember my 6th grade teacher, Mr. Dodd, putting up a “peg of the day” challenge on the blackboard. It was usually a word or math puzzle, sometimes a logic puzzle; the first person to solve it got a few small pieces of candy from Mr. Dodd’s bag of treats.
“Peg of the day” came from a then common taunt—whenever someone was the butt of a joke or the victim of a sick burn the other kids would say “peg!” or “oooh pegged!” It was a more innocent age. Anyhoo, I got banned from “peg of the day” because I won too much, to the point that when Mr. Dodd put the puzzle on the blackboard, rather than trying to solve the puzzle themselves, the other kids would just look at me to see if I had the answer immediately.
Carolyn likes the NYT Spelling Bee, and a few times a month we’ll be winding down for the day and she’ll show me the puzzle because she hasn’t solved the pangram yet. I usually get the pangram pretty fast, sometimes instantly, sometimes it takes half a minute. Carolyn is smarter than me and almost certainly has a bigger vocabulary than me, but my brain is really good at rearranging things quickly and part of my process is in the mouth—my tongue and lips “feel around” for possibilities as I consider the letters.
I start my day with Wordle (and coffee) most days. I play hard mode and use a different starting word every day. My results over 800+ games make a pretty little bell curve. Last week I started searching for French word games, thinking they might help my vocabulary or at least be a fun way to keep me engaged in learning. The French have the usual traditional puzzles: crosswords (mots croisés), and an easier variant called arrow words (mots fléchés) as well as word searches (mots mélangés) and a game called password (mot de passe) where one tries to guess a hidden word based on a single word clue.
Aside from the occasional Sunday NYT crossword puzzles that Carolyn and I do on vacation, I don’t have much patience for the longer games. I like the brevity of Wordle, a quick challenge done in a minute or two, then on with my day!
At Le Parisien Mots Fléchés - I’ve been playing Mots Coupés (they have other games) where one tries to make French words out of the grid of letter blocks, like Quartiles on Apple Games. It’s really easy to trick yourself into thinking almost any combination is a French word: LOU-MAR, why not, sounds French! BOU-GUE, gotta be French, right? (Neither of these are French words.) The game keeps a table of valid guesses on the left side; I keep a browser tab open to WordReference to look up the valid words I stumble upon.
I also found Le Mot, which is a direct copy of Wordle, but in French. It’s much harder than English language Wordle because my vocabulary is limited.
There’s also a Wordle variation called Sutom which is fairly new (launched in 2022) and combines Wordle with Motus, a popular French game show. It’s harder (for me) than Wordle because the word length varies from six to ten letters (and it’s in French).
French puzzles are ranked by FORCE to indicate difficulty:
Force 1: beginner/easy
Force 2/3: intermediate, common/general knowledge
Force 4+: advanced/difficult using French idioms, culture, and obscure references
I started thinking about puzzles because of the game-ification of learning apps like DuoLingo, which is not exactly a puzzle but does give you points. I’m hopeful that I can find a way to make puzzles a part of my regular learning.
Do any of you have a favorite word game (in any language)? Please share if you do!
à la prochain,
Roberto & Carolyn
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