I LOVE puzzles. I’m not talking the jigsaw kind, though I love those too—having a cat puts a damper on how many of those I can risk per year, however. Not worth it.
But I’m talking about the mental ones, the little games. (Especially the little phone games that are so popular now. More on those below!) I do like me a good crossword, though I prefer the online kind because delete keys are so much better than ripping paper with erasers. And I love freerice.com! I mostly do its vocab ones, and not to brag, but I get pretty high in those levels.
And I am a sucker for a good word search, too. I have an app for it on my oft-neglected tablet (purchased for writing when traveling in late 2019; you can laugh now at how little use it has gotten), and I backed a Kickstarter for a Japanese kanji word search.
I also like wordscapes, which is basically premade scrabble. You have a set amount of letters and a set amount of words to make out of those letters. Really gets the vocabulary brain cells working!
But weirdly enough? I’m mostly drawn to number puzzles.
And let me be clear: I am not a number person.
Yeah, I got decent grades in math, and can do my times tables with ease. (I once raced my accountant mother in the fifth grade to do a big multiplication problem. I almost won.) But I never liked math. And joke’s on you, middle school math teachers—we do always have access to a calculator nowadays!
That said, I live and breathe sudoku.
Arguably, it isn’t really a number puzzle. Those characters could be anything. But there are sudoku options where you must add numbers in cross-sections to be specific sums (I think it’s called killer sudoku?), and that’s certainly embarrassingly mathy. Still love it, too.
I also really love 2048. Again, granted, that is more of a pattern-based puzzle than math. For awhile when the main online one allowed images, a lot of people made custom games with images to match instead of numbers. (I played the shit out of kitten 2048.) But you better believe I now remember all of the numbers involved to get to the number 2,048.
Another game I love that has nothing to do with words but has everything to do with spatial awareness? That phone app where you match colors in test tubes. Each test tube can only hold a certain amount (of liquid, balls, etc—there are a lot of variants) and you can only match like colors. If you were smart and gifted with high spatial awareness, you could have a field day with those without actually committing to movements.
I am not. So I make liberal use of the undo button.
And I can’t get enough of that game, despite how it turns my phone into a furnace.
Another one that I’ve fallen in love with in the past few months is Zen Match, which is just a three-of-a-kind tile matching game. I’ve gotten horribly stuck, but at least it’s still fun to tap away, and true to the name, it’s a very relaxing game. Chill music, pretty background rooms you can decorate, and nature-themed backgrounds to the puzzles themselves.
There is no moral or advice to this blog post, outside of perhaps “play some games, it’ll keep your brain in shape!”. A writer’s most important asset is their mind, after all, and anything that can help sharpen it or even maintain it through the years seems like a fun way to waste a little bit of time. Choose your time wasters wisely!
