them's crossing words

Puzzmo games, ranked

Puzzmo has a whole bunch of games. Which ones are worth playing?

All of them, of course, but I have favorites. Here's my tier list of games, with a few extra Zach Gage games thrown in for good measure.

S-tier

Cross|word: look, this is a crossword blog. I'm not sure what else you could've expected here.

A-tier

Flipart: admittedly, this game doesn't have a whole lot of depth (pun intended). But as a palate cleanser between games or as a quick diversion while waiting in line, Flipart is unrivaled.

Knotwords[1] and Good Sudoku[2]: see the footnotes below, but these games together get more playtime than any other Puzzmo game, save for the Crossword.

B-tier

Typeshift: this game rules for its tactile feel alone. I'm all about scrolling those columns up and down, even though I am not the biggest fan of the "make a word from scrambled letters" style of puzzle.

Wordbind: very similar to Typeshift, but without the scrolling goodness. I think the best way to describe it is as a horizontal word search.

Pile-up Poker: the puzzle in Pile-up Poker is a fun one and offers some randomness that isn't present in other Puzzmo games. But five sets of four deals is just too much poker. This is one of the few times that I think a Puzzmo game overstays its welcome.

C-tier

Cube Clear: I'm a little bit of a SpellTower hater and Cube Clear is by all looks just a smaller version of SpellTower. However, the smaller size and rule changes actually help solve my analysis paralysis with SpellTower. I think they're great changes, although I don't play it often.

Really Bad Chess: when I was playing more chess in general, I was playing more RBC. It's not a problem with the game, just my attention span! RBC is a simple chess variant, but it's effective.

D-tier

SpellTower: my biggest gripe with SpellTower is the analysis paralysis of looking at the huge grid and deciding on a path towards the solution. The game is kinda built against quick experimentation, as evidenced by the high score walk-through where a high-skill player copies the grid into Photoshop to map out a complete solution before entering it into the game. Too much forethought for my taste.

  1. Not on Puzzmo, but should be! A fantastic word game, if not hindered a tiny bit by random puzzle generation. ↩︎

  2. Not on Puzzmo, but an obvious newspaper classic. The guys over at Cracking the Cryptic have demonstrated to me that sudoku can be just as deep and varied as crosswords when a great constructor is involved. ↩︎

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