I’m on a one-man mission to destroy your productivity. Yesterday I offered you Scrambled Maps, which is good for fifteen minutes of not working.
Today I offer Alphaguess, a once-a-day browser puzzle game in which you must guess a word. With every incorrect guess you make, the game tells you whether the correct answer comes before or after it alphabetically.
It took me 26 guesses and eight minutes to find today’s answer, which is not a result I’m proud of. You can head here to see if you can do better, and I’d wager you can.
My first guess today was “muddle”, because I figure it’s better to open with a word somewhere in the middle of the alphabet and immediately split the possibility space in half. When I struggle it’s normally because I have correctly identified the first letter or two and begin to lose sight of what’s in and out of the realm of possibility. But then I am both addled and dotty.
I regularly refer to works like Alphaguess and Wordle and Scrambled Maps as puzzle games, but I’m not sure that quite communicates their appeal. There’s no lateral thought required to complete a round of Alphaguess, no deeper understanding of its rules to be gained. It’s fundamentally easy, your success inevitable, and the outcome is only initially obscured because there are so many possible answers. It’s no different than a friend asking you to guess what number they’re thinking of between 1 and a thousand, and we wouldn’t call that a puzzle.
Yet I find the process of finding the correct word utterly diverting all the same, like playing the numberplate game on a long car journey, without the need to leave your home.
Credit to Caroline Cramptom’s newsletter, which linked to both Alphaguess and Scrambled Maps this past week.