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 who can’t visualize that, check out the GIF below, or the trailer above:
If Gage’s name sounds familiar, that’s probably because, over the last few years, he’s released a series of apps that aim to reinvent or reimagine classic games. This includes the likes of Really Bad Chess, Flipflop Solitaire, and Pocket-Run Pool. He even designed a new version of Snake for the just-released Playdate handheld, and in 2020 he teamed up with Schlesinger in an attempt to create a better digital version of sudoku. The concept for Knotwords actually predates Good Sudoku: the pair originally put the project on hold to work on the sudoku game. As part of that experience, they found new inspiration from KenKen, a sudoku derivative that divides the puzzle grid into zones that each has a math equation attached, so you not only have to solve the traditional sudoku puzzle but also get the arithmetic correct. Schlesinger came up with the idea of applying that to their word game prototype.
“That really struck a chord because when I had been working on Good Sudoku, my mom was really trying to get me to make a KenKen game instead,” Gage says. “She said ‘sudoku is really boring. KenKen is really interesting because in sudoku, you’re just applying patterns. But in KenKen, every situation is unique and you have to sort of think through the possibilities of the space.’” Gage says that when he applied the zone idea to Knotwords “it worked instantly.” The pair then split up; Gage began hand-crafting puzzles, while Schlesinger developed a puzzle generator. They would then compare notes to figure out how to generate ideal puzzles for the final game.
