Michelle and I both have really gotten into puzzling during the last year. In July we even ordered a 40 pack of variety puzzle books from Penny Dell Puzzles and have been chipping away at the first few books. But now I’ve found myself working through some online puzzles on a semi daily basis.

Wordle started out the daily puzzle craze and I joined my sister’s family and mother in a text group as we share our successes or frustrations. I like that it is fast and it’s neat to see my stats progress into a rude bird (i.e. middle finger, see the attached pic). I gained some insight into the sparsity of words and how quickly you can narrow down possibilities (I know that the creator Wardle only included “common” words). It can be a horribly hard challenge with certain words. On the other hand I don’t love how it deals with repeated letters and I wish it would move beyond just five letter words (if that wouldn’t destroy the balance too much).

Daily number two is Framed which both Michelle and I play. You see a frame from a movie and try to guess what it is, if you are wrong you get to try again with an additional picture. Upsides are that it is fast and fun. It can be infuriating to take five or six guesses only to realize that the answer is one of your favorite movies! Since this is a more curated experience then Wordle the clues and movie selections can be inconsistent, for example sometimes it feels like an early picture is extremely obvious and in the wrong order. The movies tend to be popular and modern with a penchant for horror, all of this aligns with what we watch but I could see it bothering other players.

The first of my semi-dailies is Semantle. I think this is possibly my favorite but I don’t play it every day because it can take a LOT of time. You are trying to find the target word based on its semantic relationship to your guesses. I really recommend just reading the rules and playing for a few days (and then I’d love to discuss it with you!). This one feels most like a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, but you have a bunch of random puzzle pieces mixed in that don’t belong. Post-play discussions are a blast because almost every player gets to the solution following a different path. I don’t have a solution to this, but one gripe is that plurals and tenses of words are immensely important and can eat into early guesses. Maybe if I was better at it Semantle wouldn’t take so long to solve…

I’ve only played two rounds of Redactle. I like it a lot but like Semantle it can take quite awhile. Each day the game presents you with a Wikipedia article but all except the most common words and punctuation has been redacted. When you guess a word any instances of it that were redacted are revealed. You win by revealing the article title. Since I haven’t played too much I don’t have any specific gripes yet other than I don’t know anyone else who is playing and I would LOVE to talk about how dumb I felt after finishing today’s puzzle.

This one isn’t really a daily puzzle but I’ve got to include it! Duolingo is what Michelle and I are using to jump start learning Portuguese. I really am enjoying the format and feel like I’ve already learned more than I did taking 2+ years of Spanish. Before starting on Duo I often felt like I had a problem where I couldn’t learn other languages like most people, I don’t have that fear anymore. There are some downsides, primarily that using the unpaid version on a phone is extremely limited (you can bypass most of the limitations by playing on a web browser). In our specific circumstances we should be learning European Portuguese and Duo only offers Brazilian. Pronunciation is quite different and there are definitely other usage differences, but as a starting point I think it’s doing just fine. Once we get to Portugal there are free classes put on by the government which I hope to enroll in ASAP.

I’m not sure what I’ll stick with or not once I officially retire in just over one week. I do know that doing a few puzzles each day is a nice way to wake up my brain as I drink my coffee. Post in the comments if you have any favorites!