“What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.”
-Jane Goodall
Literacy is fundamental to learning. My mother prefers math over language, because she hates reading, but in order to solve a math problem, you must learn to read the numbers and signs on the paper to get a better understanding of what needs to be solved. To acquire more knowledge, reading and verbal reasoning is necessary. Even when it comes to abstract and logical reasoning, articulating your thoughts and ideas in words can make it easier to remember them, organize them, and manipulate them.
Many word games are designed to help exercise the fundamental skills of literacy while making them entertaining to an everyday audience. With that being said, I gathered three word games that are conducive to this exercise.
Lexigo
Lexigo is a word game that can be found on merriam-webster.com. When playing, certain letters are displayed on a screen. The first letter of a word you must figure out is highlighted in magenta. A clue would be shown at the bottom of the screen, and using this clue, players must solve for the word by clicking on the letters that spell it. Players can click in any direction, and the same letter can be used more than once if necessary. Lexigo puzzles are timed.
Pros:
With the need to distinguish and click on letters that spell out a clue, spatial as well as verbal reasoning can be practiced.
You can replay the puzzle to improve your time.
Hints are available for free. Clicking on a hint will allow the next letter of a word to be revealed.
Cons:
There is only one Lexigo puzzle a day, so the only way you can play more Lexigo after solving a puzzle is by redoing the puzzle. You will have to wait until the next day to have a new puzzle to solve.
There are only a few clues to solve (about four or five). This means there is not much to do on Merriam Webster’s Lexigo.
Word Master
The game “Wordmaster” can be found on the website Brainzilla.com. In the game, a person must make as many words as possible with a set of randomly given letters. To create a word, players must click on certain letters in the order that the word is spelled. All words except for abbreviations, slang, and proper nouns are allowed.
Pros:
Since the letters are randomly selected in no particular order, not only is crystallized intelligence and memory used throughout the game, but also creativity.
The game is updated four times a day, so multiple different puzzles can be played in a single day.
Underneath the letters, there are rows of squares, where each square represents a letter, and these rows are arranged based on size and ordered alphabetically, so players can apply basic organizational and deductive skills to find the words.
Cons:
The game ends only when the player finds all the words, and since the words, according to the website, come from a North American word list, a person can sit in front of their computer for a while, and finding the answers can all come down to guesswork and trial-and-error.
DTC
DTC, or Daily Themed Crossword, is a free crossword app. Every day, two new crossword puzzles are made available for users to solve: a Mini Crossword, which has only about ten words to solve, and a Themed Crossword, which is a longer crossword that is of a certain theme (ex. Academic Fridays, Music Mondays, Retro Tuesdays, etc.) There are three daily goals in DTC, and they may vary from day to day. All crosswords on the app are timed. Based on how fast you can complete these crosswords, you can get a certain amount of stars, the minimum amount being one and the maximum amount being three. Coins can be earned as crosswords are completed as well, and these can be spent on advantages, such as hints and revealing words, or they can be spent on crosswords from the packs.
Pros:
There are a lot of things you can do on DTC—the two daily crosswords, the packs, the milestones, the bounties, the goals, etc.
There are a variety of themes, including seasonal themes, holiday themes, musical references, movie references, common phrases, and more, allowing diverse knowledge in trivia and verbal knowledge to be exercised.
Mastery tournaments can show your ranking among all other players of DTC and stars and a gaming currency system is available throughout the game, so competition, gaming, and goals can make it motivating to keep playing.
Cons:
If you need the answer to a clue you cannot solve, you have to spend coins, which may seem inconvenient, since there may be a point in time when there is a piece of trivia you do not know. I realized that if you type the clue you cannot solve online and punctuate it with the phrase dtc, websites like dtcanswers.com, dailythemedcrosswordanswers.com, and dailythemedcrossword.net can be used to find the answer to the clue, but this may still be inconvenient, since you would have to stop playing the crossword, look up the clue, and then go back on the app to write down the answer.
An Evaluation: Which is Better?
I am familiar with all three word games, but I have a preference for Daily Themed Crossword because of the variety of puzzles to solve, the gamification of its crosswords, and the many activities that can be completed on the app. While Lexigo has the free hints that DTC lacks, it lacks the variety and multitude of activities that DTC has, because there is only one five-word-puzzle a day. I appreciate Word Master for the creative, organizational, and deductive skills it requires, but I believe learning methods to solve crosswords still requires creativity, organization, and deduction as well. Additionally, although I find it inconvenient that I have to stop playing a crossword just to look up the answer to a clue containing a weird music reference I don’t know, doing this is much better than sitting in front of a computer taking a trial-and-error approach to arranging letters on Word Master containing words I don’t know just to finish the game.
That being said, Lexigo and Word Master are not necessarily bad games. Since merriam-webster.com, an online dictionary, makes the daily Lexigos, I can always feel assured that I am playing a game from a credible source, and often, merriam-webster.com displays word quizzes and word-of-the-day flashcards, making me able to learn something new and motivate myself to keep playing a Lexigo game.
Games similar to Word Master can be played without the use of the internet and electricity. Word Master-inspired games help expand the horizons of word games. For instance, I have gotten into the habit of thinking of random words and finding as many words as possible that can be made out of the letters. (Ex. The three-letter word “eat” produces a unique set of words: eat, at, ate, a, tea.)
Daily Themed Crossword, Lexigo, and Word Master are among a few word games out there. Word games like these three can be an entertaining yet productive way to learn the fundamental skills of literacy, speech, and verbal reasoning.
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