I see the New York Times Guild is going on strike tomorrow and puzzle nerds are realizing they can't play Wordle (assuming they don't want to cross the picket line to play with puzzles). I'll post links to my daily morning routine puzzles which don't involve the NYT. Yes, each of these gives you a snippet of text you can copy-paste into your socials for bragging purposes.
Toddle
![[screen shot of game interface. A clue says 'Urban Place'. Some letters: T O R N. Caption 'Choose a letter or guess the answer'. The user has started to enter an answer: city police department]](https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/importable/2022/toddle-screen-shot.jpg)
Toddle works kinda like TV's Wheel of Fortune, but different. You start out knowing some of the letters in the answer, but you don't know the "blanks". E.g. in the picture above, you know the answer looks like …T…O…R…N… but you don't know how many "blanks" are in any of the …s. So you might guess ciTy pOlice depaRtmeNt.
Also kinda like Wheel of Fortune, you can ask for a letter; but it won't tell you everywhere that letter appears; but just one more place it appears. But you can keep asking for the same letter, so eventually you can see everyplace the letter appears. E.g., if you ask for A, that "TORN" might become "TOARN"; ask for A again, and you might get "TOAARN". The more letters you ask for, the higher your score. You want a low score.
Cell Tower
Cell Tower presents you with a tall (towering) grid of letters. You highlight clusters of letters that form words. If you divvy the whole grid into words, you win.
![[screen shot of game: a grid of letters. some clusters of letters, each forming a word, have been highlighted]](https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/importable/2022/cell-tower-screenshot.jpg "a grid of letters. some clusters of letters, each forming a word, have been highlighted")
As you mark off the grid, you probably won't guess right all the time about which words to highlight. In the picture above, towards the bottom, should that "-rap" go with the "c" to form "crap" or the "t" to form trap? I dunno. So I pick one and keep going. If you run into trouble, you can click one of the words you already made and tell the game to undo that word. So if you guess "crap" and want to change to "trap" later, you can.
