Cell Tower, a word search game

June 10, 2022 5:37 AM

Cell Tower, a word search game in which you find words on a grid. Letters must be all connected orthogonally, and read top-down, left-right. Click the hamburger menu to access both the daily and previous puzzles, and instructions. Note that there are lots of words available, but only one solution that uses all the letters in the grid.
posted by Gorgik (25 comments total)

That was fun! I don't think it's going become an internet sensation though, despite the shareable results. It takes too long to play and the scoring grid is too complicated for social media. Also too complicated for me, I have no idea how I'd tell if I do better tomorrow.

Anyhow, thanks for the new fun game!
posted by lemonade at 6:20 AM on June 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wow, this is quite hard and weird and requires some serious lateral thinking! I'm liking it.
posted by dusty potato at 7:13 AM on June 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

can't reach the button on mobile and switching to desktop still forces it to the same view. oh well.
posted by lkc at 11:19 AM on June 10, 2022

I used to play a game somewhat similar to this, and I find them interesting, but once the grids get this big, the lack of feedback while you're playing makes the whole thing hard to want to play. If you make a mistake, you have no way of knowing that you made a mistake, so you can go a long way down the wrong path before you realize that you're wrong.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:21 AM on June 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

I filled in a bunch of words, then asked for a hint and all the wrong ones were removed. It started making a lot more sense at that point.
posted by box at 11:47 AM on June 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

I had to give up and see the solution to understand how the game actually works. Will try it again tomorrow now that I know how to play.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:06 PM on June 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

that was fun! much easier once I figured out to start from the bottom

the scoring seems... I would prefer the ability to play around without having my "perfect game" penalized by the movements of little blue arrows, although idk if I'd mind "it took you 13 guesses out of a perfect 10" as much
posted by taquito sunrise at 12:26 PM on June 10, 2022

FYI, unlike other recently popular word games, you can also play the archives.

If you make a mistake, you have no way of knowing that you made a mistake, so you can go a long way down the wrong path before you realize that you're wrong.

Nikoli has product a long line of puzzles that are solvable via deduction. That is, you can reason about the puzzle in local areas, mark certain things out, and make progress that way. For example, Fillomino (online version) has you filling in a grid of numbers. Crucially, these puzzles are designed to avoid "guess and check" methods. Instead, you build expertise through discovering patterns let you quickly mark the puzzle. (Sudoku is full of these.)

Many have a sort of path mechanic, or a wall mechanic to divide regions, and this logic extends here, partially. For example, you know in today's puzzle that the S in the top left corner must join the T, because no words start with "SR". However this puzzle is more complicated because you cannot rule out "SR" as belonging to same region -- the R is potentially connected to the S-word via squares up and to the right. So far, this is the only deduction strategy I've been able to discover. The puzzle seems mostly a guess and check affair, as there isnt a way to mark a squares as definitely connected / not connected, and sometimes you may not know immediately whether an 'S' is to make a word plural or used in another word.
posted by pwnguin at 12:48 PM on June 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

no words start with "SR"

SRI/SRIS (a title), SRADHA/SRADDHA/SRADHAS/SRADDHAS (a ceremonial offering), and SRIRACHA (a hot sauce) are all playable in Scrabble.

I'm sorry.
posted by box at 1:07 PM on June 10, 2022

SRI/SRIS (a title), SRADHA/SRADDHA/SRADHAS/SRADDHAS (a ceremonial offering), and SRIRACHA (a hot sauce) are all playable in Scrabble.

Seven more reasons not to play Scrabble, IMO.
posted by pwnguin at 1:10 PM on June 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

I hear you on the first six—the Scrabble dictionaries have a lot of loan words that rarely if ever get used by most English speakers and seemingly exist to make high-level play (and I am on my best day a mid-level player) a game of memorization.

But looking at a rack like AACHIRR, and somehow finding SRIRACHA for a bingo? That feeling is why people become high-level Scrabble players.
posted by box at 5:54 PM on June 10, 2022

Seven more reasons not to play Scrabble, IMO

SRABBLE
posted by Omnomnom at 2:25 AM on June 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

I hated this when I tried it last night and wasn't really in the right frame of mind for it but I woke up today and tried again and love it.

I find it is a LOT easier to start from the bottom, since you can usually tell what word endings you can make out of what is near the bottom row and from that ensure you don't have any unworkable orphans. The other hardest part for me was getting my brain to realize that letters could actually be quite far from each other in one row but brought together by the row below/ditto columns.
posted by urbanlenny at 11:52 AM on June 11, 2022

I find it works best to find the word with the most difficult, limiting letter, like a V or a Z to begin and move out from there. This is super fun and once I got a few games under my belt it got much easier but still challenging enough to be really enjoyable.
posted by Plafield at 1:36 PM on June 11, 2022

somehow finding SRIRACHA for a bingo

Honestly, SRIRACHA was the only one of them that crossed my mind and I had ruled it out as an invalid proper noun. TIL its not exclusively used to describe rooster sauce.
posted by pwnguin at 5:55 PM on June 11, 2022

I'm enjoying the game, but the one thing I don't like is the flashing letters of the word I'm working on. I'm thinking, don't rush me, leave me alone! Other than that it's a nice game, and very satisfying when you finally put all the pieces together.
posted by Umami Dearest at 11:53 PM on June 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

About 3 seconds in I ragequit in annoyance at the game rearranging letters. I select TEND. Fine. I add ON to make TENDON and the game flips to tell me that TONEND is not a word. If I can’t tell it what order the letters should be in, I’m kind of out.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:46 AM on June 12, 2022

If I can’t tell it what order the letters should be in, I’m kind of out.

Hmm. There’s only one rule to this game, and that’s Divide the grid into regions so that each region contains a four-to-eight-letter English word when read left-to-right top-to-bottom. There is only one way to cover the entire grid in words. I guess if you really hate that rule, then, yeah, this won’t be the game for you.

It took me about five games to really get the hang of it, but I just played a perfect game, so I’m definitely getting there. Probably add it to my daily rotation for a while.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 1:35 PM on June 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Love this game!

#CellTower 8

➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️
posted by maggieb at 7:33 PM on June 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

I like this! I thought I wouldn't because word search games are usually not very interesting to me, but I guess the more limited board size and the trickiness of getting them all to fit together adds zest!

This is the one I just did -- only my third, after trying out two last week:

#CellTower 39

➡️⏹⬇️⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬇️⬜
⬆️⬆️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️⏹➡️

This seems not too awful? I have no idea! Can't really can't tell much about the scoring, tbh. The first one I did was like one of those Family Circle cartoons showing the little boy meandering around the map on his errand / walk to school / whatever.
posted by taz at 4:03 AM on June 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

It took me the first game to understand properly what was being asked of me ("there is only one way to cover the entire grid" somehow failed to convey "the only goal is to cover the entire grid", so I was expecting to be awarded a score based on how much of the grid I *had* managed to cover). And it took me the second game to understand that letters 1 and 2 can be on the same row but not adjacent, as long as they're connected somewhere below.

... Anyway, teething problems addressed, now I can't stop playing. It's probably just as well the archive is only a month long at this point.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 9:55 AM on June 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

Tried again today and had to give up but then I tried yesterday's and was able to solve it. I guess that means I'm getting the hang of it.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:30 PM on June 13, 2022

It took getting halfway through the archive for me to get the hang of it, and now I'm definitely hooked. Don't much care for/about the scoring system though. Also the first time I played I thought the colors meant something, like it would only be green or whatever if you got the word right, but no, the colors are just there to help differentiate between words.
posted by yasaman at 3:55 PM on June 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

Side note: USA English is not the only English.
posted by Night_owl at 6:27 PM on June 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

aha!!

#CellTower 40

➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️➡️

whew! That was my 7th puzzle.
posted by taz at 4:13 AM on June 14, 2022 [3 favorites]