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this game is fine

also this review spoils today's puzzle so if you want to play it, do it now

so look. this game is obviously quite similar to cell tower. it's not quite the same, and legally you can't protect a game mechanic, so there's probably no point in me publicly accusing anyone of anything. that said, i think it's instructive to think about how one might get from "let's steal cell tower in the same week we sent out a bunch of takedowns for wordle clones" to "strands, as she is played" by just making the most obvious decision at every stage:

• first things first, you need to change the trade dress — your wordle takedowns refer to the name, the colours, and the "five by six grid of squares" so the first order of business is to change the name, resize the grid, and switch the squares for circles. cell tower is loads of different bold colours so lets go for one pastel.
• next up, the "regions read left to right, top to bottom" is slightly tricky for new players to get their heads around, and extremely characteristic of cell tower, so get rid of that and replace it with a more intuitive "words read along a line you draw" mechanic.
• uh-oh, this extra freedom to link letters however you like opens up a lot more red-herring words. make the game reject any wrong guesses immediately to keep the player on the right track
• oh no, repeatedly putting in perfectly cromulent words and being told they're wrong for no very obvious reason is frustrating as all shit. the player needs a clue as to what the "correct" words are. let's add a theme so you know what to look for.
• oh no, this makes the game an absolute piece of piss, i know, let's not tell the player what the theme is, just offering a vague hint. the real theme is hidden in the grid along with everything else. let's make it go all the way across and highlight in yellow because that's cute
• oh no, the game is frustrating as all shit again, let's add a hint button
• oh no, the game is an absolute piece of piss again, let's lock the hint button until you find three real words that aren't in the answer so players feel like they earned the hint and can use it without feeling like they're cheating

unfortunately, none of this really solves the fundamental problem, which is that the game is frustrating as all shit when you don't know the theme, and an absolute piece of piss when you do — the only really interesting part is when you've found a couple of words and have to work out the theme (another classic only connect device). that's the core of the game, for me, and with some themes that takes less than one second.

and the thing is? this is so close to being a fun game. (i mean, excluding just replacing it with cell tower.)

when i was developing cell tower, i generated some puzzles and solved them on paper before building the web player and they were fun. that's why i built the rest of it. i assumed that the "frustrating as all shit" section of strands would mean it was unplayable on paper, but in the spirit of scientific rigor, i tried it, and no — it's way better on paper. i found a big long word and thought "oh, that's too good to be wrong" but then i found another way to make the same word which isn't allowed, so i knew it was wrong. then i found an even longer word that had some fairly specific connotations and then i spent a happy minute scouting for other words that might confirm my hunch. theme confirmed, i searched out the spangram and from there it was a clear run to the finish line. that third bullet point was the big mistake — telling me whether each word is right or wrong skips the most interesting part of the puzzle. this seems like a bizarre mis-step for a company whose main product is a daily paper known for its puzzles

ofc the game is markedly harder on paper, but if they simply added a "hard mode" option where it didn't give you any feedback until the grid was full and the solution complete, i honestly think it would immediately be a way better game. ofc, it would also immediately feel way more like cell tower, which (cynically) is not what you want if you've stolen the concept and filed off the serial numbers and (charitably) may just mean that it's the kind of thing I enjoy rather than the kind of thing normal people enjoy. but that's why it's optional

ps

i've also noticed it's common for there to be multiple valid solutions — in the screenshot above, for example, you can make "COMMA" with the Ms in either order. far as i can tell, the game takes the view that as long as you use all the right tiles and spell the right word, it considers that "the same". this may be a byproduct of the fact today's theme is "palindomes" — the game cannot store the correct way to make a word as the words today have to be accepted starting from either end. the line doesn't change but how you draw it does and that affects what word you're submitting (usually). that said, it would not be very hard to add "you can't cross the line" as a rule. that said, there are no rules. this game is the fucking purge. "RACECAR" is in today's puzzle and you can put it in and then enter RACE using the same letters and it'll accept it like any other off-theme word and give you some hint meter. all the rules about words not crossing over each other and letters not being used twice and the answer being unique and so on are all encoded into the answers — the game engine does not give a fuck. this seems like a ludicrous way to build a game to me but i mean sure, whatever, i expect it makes the game engine 2% simpler. idk, if you ask me they should have put it on a hex grid anyway, it would look less like cell tower and the controls would be nicer because moving diagonally between two letters without hitting the two between is actually one of the harder parts of the game. hex grids are a faff to code though so whatever, this will do 🤷