My One Game

I don't play computer or tablet games; I really don't.

Oh, sometimes a game will catch my interest for awhile, but it is usually short-lived.

Back when computers were young, like in the mid-80s, I played a lot more. There was Frogger, Pacman, Pole Position, and Tetris (a little later) along with others.

But since maybe the early 90s, not much.

However, one game that I have downloaded onto my tablet does get played a bit as proved by the level that you see in the screenshot: Wordscapes.

Mind you, I completed all of those levels over a long period of time, during which the game might be set aside for a week or more. So it's not as if I'm addicted although I also have the game on my phone, where I have play a similar number of levels. Sue plays it a lot more and is on level 2641. (I just checked.)

That's a lot of levels, and I don't know if one ever comes to the end of the game. But Sue is not addicted either; it's just a good game to pass a little time when there is a little time to pass if you know what I mean. In other words, you can play a round in fairly short order when you're between tasks.

BTW, they're not so much levels as rounds. At least, I don't notice the rounds getting much harder if at all.

Here is what the game looks like: kind of a mix between a crossword and a word scramble. The crossword part of it helps you after you fill in a few initial words. I mean, knowing one letter in a word can really help you to figure out the whole word.

But I didn't really start this post to extol the glories of Wordscapes. No: I came to post of the weirdness of the mind — or at least of my mind.

I don't know how many times I have wrestled with a problem only to leave it and have the solution pop into my head while I was doing something else. The shower, by the way, seems to be a good place for random inspiration, which I found to be quite true when I was doing website coding a number of years ago. I would hit a roadblock and leave the coding but then have the solution pop into my head in the shower or while chopping onions or whatever.

I hadn't expected this to happen with Wordscapes. But it did.

I had been playing a round that was longer than the one pictured above, and I got totally stuck on the last two words. There was something that needed doing in the kitchen, so I passed my tablet to Sue, and said, "Here, you try it because I'm stuck."

Maybe a half moment later, without the clues to look at, I asked Sue from the kitchen, "Does matron fit?"

Sure enough, it did. And that helped to unlock the very last entry, which I got in a flash.

I find that strange: to go round and round, trying all sorts of combinations of letters and being stymied, only to grasp the answer when I wasn't even looking at the letters.

BTW: if you want to try the game, it's free although there are commercials after every round, which you can eliminate by forking up $3.99, which is not bad at all ... although I haven't done it.