Knotwords mashes Wordle with crossword puzzles

theverge.com:

For years, designer Zach Gage has been enamored with the works of famed Japanese game publisher Nikoli. The company is best known for popularizing sudoku, and is renowned for its minimalist takes on puzzles like nonograms (which Nintendo fans might recognize as Picross). For Gage, creating that kind of clean, straightforward, and accessible puzzle was a long sought-after goal. He describes it as a “kind of obsession,” one that “feels like a really great design challenge because it’s so hard to do.” He tried plenty of ideas but eventually landed on a solution: the humble crossword.

This week Gage and partner Jack Schlesinger are releasing Knotwords on iOS, Android, Mac, and PC. It’s a game built on the premise that the most interesting part of a crossword puzzle isn’t actually all of the clever clues, but the grid of letters itself. “There’s this kind of weird thing with crosswords, which is that if you talk to crossword players about crosswords, it’s all about the clues and the structure of the clueing,” Gage says. “But the thing is, the actual grid of letters is incredibly complicated… but as a player, it’s like this little side effect that you’re not even focusing on.”

Knotwords uses that grid as the basis for a word-focused puzzle game. Each Knotwords puzzle looks like a crossword, but instead of utilizing cryptic clues to solve what are essentially trivia questions, you solve the puzzle by creating valid words from predetermined groups of letters. Each puzzle is divided into zones, and in each zone, you can only use specific letters. The challenge comes from figuring out ways to use those specific arrangements of letters to create the correct words, which fill up the grid just like in a crossword puzzle. For those