New daily word game Knotwords is a twist on crosswords, Wordle, and sudoku

Game designer Zach Gage is a conceptual artist and game designer. He loves optimizing the most beloved, popular and ubiquitous games around the globe. Previous targets of his tinkering include solitaire, chess, pool, and sudoku. He and Jack Schlesinger, his co-developer are now back and they will tackle crossword puzzles.

Knotwords — which is out now on Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows PC — is a crossword for people who don’t like solving clues, cryptic or otherwise. In fact, it’s a mash-up of crosswords and killer sudoku. Killer Sudoku and KenKen are similar math games. Players can be guided by boxing in portions of grids and then indicating the sum of all numbers within each “cage”. Knotwords uses similar cages and tells you what the letters within each cage are, but not where to place them.

Crosswords are where you start with a clue and guess the word. Then, combine the clues and place letters to complete the puzzle. In Knotwords, you are assembling words from their raw materials, in a process not entirely dissimilar from the way you narrow down your options after the first guess or two in Wordle.

Playing Knotwords does depend on a decent grounding in vocabulary and the arcane rules and tendencies of English spelling, as Wordle does. But less so. These are really just the foundation for what becomes a pure game of logic and tactics. The way to break into a puzzle is usually via two- or three-letter words, where options are limited. Further solutions will start to cascade from there. If you ever do get stuck, you can ask for a hint, which gives you a dictionary definition for a word you’re stumped on. It’s odd how much this feels like cheating, when it’s the core gameplay of non-cryptic crosswords like the wonderful New York Times mini crossword.

It’s more helpful, really, to think of Knotwords as sudoku with letters, rather than as a crossword variant. As Gage told The Verge, he found the complex grid of letters more interesting than the clues crossword players would focus on. While he and Schlesinger were working on their sudoku app Good Sudoku, Gage’s mother tried to persuade him to make a KenKen game instead — and when he applied the grouped-cells mechanic to a crossword grid, “it worked instantly.” Wordle creator Josh Wardle has called Knotwords “an incredibly elegant daily word game.”

Elegance has been a Gage thing. This partly manifests in the pristine graphic design and snappy interfaces of the apps he and Schlesinger build. His passion is to strip a game of its most essential elements and shine a light on any obscured or unreadable parts. He strives to eliminate risk and randomness.

The results are often objectively beautiful systems and satisfying to play. They can also feel monotonous and over-optimized to the point that they become alienating. Good Sudoku seeks to train and assist the player in the art of the number puzzle to such an extent that it can often feel like the game is playing itself, and you are just a cog in its mechanism. Sage Solitaire blends solitaire and poker in a way that is undeniably clever but academically dry, and loses sight of what makes solitaire such a compelling and capricious way to spend your time. The Flipflop Solititaire is more similar. Card of Darkness, a sort of math-solitaire-roguelite game with gloriously surreal art by Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward, is just coldly brutal to play.

Gage’s purist interest in game systems often leads him to design out the soul of the game, or to ignore the player’s emotional, as opposed to intellectual, investment. Knotwords is no different. It’s a clever word game that’s a pleasure to play, and I do recommend downloading it — the basic daily puzzle and 10 monthly puzzles are free, while a one-off or subscription payment gives you access to the full archive, a daily variant, and extra monthly puzzle books. It’s absorbing, but detached. A game of Wordle feels like a thrilling, emotional journey. A game of Knotwords feels like you’re just filling in boxes.