Alphique: the game where cross word puzzles meet Sudoku! Fill in all the letters for the puzzle correctly to win! Race against time to see who can solve it fastest, or perhaps demonstate your wit by solving the puzzle in the fewest number of actions. If you're crazy, forego the hints (don't recommend if you actually want to enjoy playing). Compete against friends and family for the lowest score, but most importantly, have fun!

Alphique is a word game that challenges your vocabulary to fill in a cross word puzzle, but this is no ordinary cross word puzzle. For starters, there are no clues for any words! Instead, you are given a set of letters and you have to fill in the locations based on what words fit. That's the tricky part, though: What fits? Like Sudoku which restricts one number per row and column, this cross word puzzle restricts rows and columns to unique letters. Reading left to right and top to bottom, everything must be a word, acronym, or abbreviation.

• Tap the letter buttons to spell out a word
• Possible locations highlight on the grid
• To add the word, tap the highlighted grid cells
• If only one place is highlighted, you can add by tapping the word box
• Tapping the red circle button clears out the word
• Hints identifying bad letters or words can be removed by tapping them or submitting the next word
• To remove a word, tap it. If the other orientation is desired tap it again. Then tap the red circle button.

Goal of the Game

As you can probably guess, the goal of the game is to fill in each empty box with a letter. Doing so is not as easy as it looks, as each row and column can only have each letter once. There's unique alpha(bet) characters - you could say it's Alphique. Likewise, words, acronyms, and abbreviations are spelled out reading left to right and top to bottom (like any crossword puzzle). You are scored by solving it quickly, with minimal hints, and minimal letter/word submissions. Low scores are good.

User Entry

The recommended way to play the game is to use the blue buttons as a keyboard. Those are the only letters you are allowed to use, and as you type out a word, they'll disable to prevent entering in duplicate letters. As you type in a word, the grid will show all the different places it can fit on the board in light blue. To add it to the board, you can either tap the highlighted position on the board, or if there is only one entry, you can tap the typed out word in the blue box.

The poor scoring methodology to play the game is to enter in letters individually. You may tap each cell to highlight it, and then the blue buttons will disable appropriately based on letter uniqueness. Tapping a letter button will then enter it into the cell. Each letter entered this way is worth a point. If you enter a full word, it is worth a point. Points are bad. However, it is good practice to select a cell to easily determine what letters can go there. It is a lot easier to come up with a word when you narrow down particular positions to be one or two letters.

The red button shown is a clear button. It's used to clear out the word typed without adding it, or remove unconfirmed things from the board. There is another button that is not pictured in the image. That is an older UI, but there's a back button now. It duplicates some of the clear functionalities, but it's primary purpose is to remove the last letter typed.

The Word Entered Box

Directly above the "Get Hint" button is a blue and white box that shows the current word being spelled out. Any time you tap that, it clears out the word typed. In the event that there is only space it fits on the board, it will automatically add it. This is meant to enable your thumbs to always stay near the lower portion of your phone when playing, as that is simply ergonomically easier to handle. Occasionally, the "Get Hint" button will suggest a 3 or 4 letter word, and it will show up in this box as if you typed it. That word is guaranteed to be on the board, though it may fit in multiple locations.

Removing Words

Uniqueness

Each row and column can not have repeat letters. Words should not also be repeated. This is the tie-in to being like Sudoku. While signficant effort is made to prevent the two letter combos from repeating, they can easily slip by when I succeed at getting two large words running adjacent to one another. Given that figuring out the large words is arguably more fun than the filler words, I will let the two letter repeats slide occasionally when building the puzzles.

Sizing

The grid sizes are going to range in the 6x6 to 10x10 range. While a non-square puzzle has not been made yet, there is nothing preventing a board to be 6x10. The number of letters used will match the largest dimension of the puzzle, and there is guaranteed to be at least one word using all the letters. While it does happen, it is very rare that there are multiple words that use all the letters. In one super rare case, there were 4 words. I was flabbergasted. I could only get 3 of them in, but in the event that there are multiple max letter words, as many of them as possible are going to be used.

Hints

There is an entire segment devoted to hints, but the quick summary is be smart. Use them to validate the game board as currently entered and get additional guaranteed letters on the board. It's very difficult to solve with just one hint per letter to start the game, and this is meant to be solvable in 15 minutes or less.

Strategies

Use hints early to fill out the board, but not excessively as they may be needed later and there are time punishments for repeated use. Because the board accepts any valid solution, but hints always point towards one solution, hints towards the end may not really provide meaningful information.

Start big, and then work your way small. Big words provide more restrictions, and there are inherently less of them that could fit in a given spot. If you fill in a 2 letter word, let's say "SI" (silicon), but the word actually was "IS", that may mean the word "SILVER" no longer fits in the spot. Instead, you may thing "SLIVER" fits there, but now the L and I are propagating incorrectly. At the end, what are largely swappable words pushed you away from the parts that are unique.

Periodically use a hint when trying to determine words just as a gut check. Multiple large words may fit in a single position when the board isn't filled out. The reason it may be so hard to find a word for a spot is because an incorrect entry was made earlier. The way you discover that the earlier word was incorrect is that you can no longer proceed with the puzzle... or just tap the hint button. That is far less frustrating.

A new puzzle is made available every night at midnight. Via the menu's history tab, you can go back and play puzzles from prior days. The first puzzle became available on July 14th, 2024. You will also discover, the original puzzles were hard. Too hard. This goes back to a time when I thought people would enjoy expanding their vocabulary, but instead they just rage quit at the choice of esoteric words while waiting for hints.

The puzzles themselves are handcrafted by the developer via an unpublished webapp that acts as an aid. First, the grid size is chosen, and then a random word is selected that fits the largest length of the puzzle. That selects the letters for the puzzle. A list of words sorted by the number of letters is found to see if there's enough "good" words to work with. Often times, there's not, and that process gets repeated 10 or so times in a row. Words are then selected, and all the possible locations it can fit are displayed on the screen. Words are then added one by one, and any combination of letters that are not a valid word, acronym, or abbreviation are highlighted red. Those are then attempted to be resolved. Often times it can't be done, and the word is attempted in a new location or outright abandoned. This process starts with the largest words while there's the least restrictions, and continually shrinks down until only two letter combos are left. It is a very manual, arduos process, so I hope y'all enjoy solving them.

The allowed list is roughly 15,000 words, acronyms, and abbreviations. It was scraped from another extensive, free to use list that was close to 200,000 entries. My version is under constant revision, because sometimes you come across things that should never be accepted for decency reasons. Other things are so obscure that you don't want it to be even considered an option while building puzzles (such as the genus of some flower that grows in one particular mountain range). Finally, that list missed many common words that make you sit back and wonder how they were missing, such as hid, she, our, mage, grew, of, and, so, etc. (and by etc., I literally mean "etc" and that the list goes on). The list tends to grow bit by bit, usually when I see a word would fit in a location and it doesn't show up as a possibility.

Words are read left to right and top to bottom, but it's not just words. As it turns out, making these puzzles is quite difficult. To achieve a decent density of letters in the puzzle, acronyms and abbreviations are a must. Automatic abbreviations: Every state in the USA (Developer's American) and the periodic table. So yes, SB is valid, because that's element 51: Antimony. Otherwise, I tried to stick to relatively common abbreviations you may come across, like ST for street, or the alphabet soup organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency or the United Nations.

Because most two letter combos and some three letter combos can likely be something you haven't heard of nor would think of off hand, it is recommended to try and save those for the very end. These often can be swapped to provide a valid solution, so wasting hints on them because they're not the identified solution is not helpful.

All these puzzles are handcrafted. There are presently 17,957 "words" in the list of 145,000 english words that are 10 or less unique letters. A free list of words was found online, and it did include a lot of proper nouns and slang. I do not necessarily know what these words mean as I build the puzzles, but as I come across things that fit, I do look them up and curate the list. I was very surprised to find things missing like HIM and was confused what xiv was until I discovered my list counted to 100 in roman numerals. There are also a lot of proper names of famous scientists, presidents, countries, cities, etc. While these are not meant to be in the list of acceptable words, you can probably get away with it for a bit. Reading through each entry and then doing a google search on every unknown thing is not on my priority list (though I did for all 2 and 3 letter entries).

Being that these are handcrafted, and I do lookup unknown things, I keep the words relatively kid friendly in a PG/PG-13 sense. However, there is nothing stopping them from entering inappropriate entries to fill the board. If they typed it, they already knew it. They aren't getting it from here. Some words have been manually removed from the word list as I don't even want to accidentally have it accepted when building the puzzle. If I notice potential for problematic words being displayed on the screen, I'll often provide starting hints to make the word not fit anywhere.

Regardless of the woes of said list, do not worry so much about the two and three letter combos. The periodic table of elements, all US state abbreviations, and a number of alphabet soup organizations are considered valid two letter words. After completion of the puzzle, a list of all the words in the target solution are provided. Selecting the word may give a very brief definition, especially if the word feels on the obscure side. Below is the list of words as of Dec. 12, 2024.

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

Save Time, Use Hints

While there is a purist mentality of trying to not use hints, do yourself a favor and use them. It is incredibly difficult to solve Alphqiue puzzles without them. A puzzle should hopefully only take 5-15 minutes to solve, and if you don't take advantage of the hints, it could easily take a frustrating hour. This is supposed to be fun, not frustrating.

Hint Scoring

A hint given is the equivalent of 30 seconds of game play when it comes to scoring. A single hint may not feel like it does much, but a group of hints can start the ball rolling. Once a couple of larger words are discovered, things start to flow a little easier, so it's better to use them earlier rather than later.

Implicit Hint Knowledge

Based on the hint priority, there is implicit knowledge provided in the hints. If a hint suggests a 3 or 4 letter word or informs you of a letter on the board, that means nothing on the board is seen as incorrect. If you do not want to obtain new knowledge beyond what you have already entered into the board, you can select a previously entered word or letter. Then when you tap the Get Hint button, it will either turn the selection red for bad, or orange to lock in the correct letters.

Smart Word Validation

Whenever guessing decently large words that fit, it is recommended to use a hint. When near the maximum number of letters for a word, there often are not many words to choose them. For example, given a puzzle with 8 letters, there is typically only one 8 letter word, and zero to a handful of 7 letter words. However, there typically are a large number of 6 letter words. For example, compare the words "SILVER" and "SLIVER." On a fresh board, it is not hard to imagine that either one of those words would fit in the same spot. However, there are consequences to putting the wrong word in. Now the "I" and "L" will presumably be blocked for the wrong rows and columns. While the board will accept any solution in the list of valid acronyms, abbreviations, and words, a solution given a wrong decent sized word is unlikely. It is far better to use a hint and be told the word is wrong right away instead of after filling in 5 additional words and discovering that the last spot to fill in cannot be made valid.

Hints for Multiple Incorrect Entries

If there are multiple incorrect entries, a hint is only going to tell you about one of them at random. In this particular case, while you don't know what may be correct or incorrect, it is incredibly annoying to be told 5 different two letter entries are incorrect before being told the 5 letter word is incorrect. If it informs you a small word is wrong, it is recommended to start validating the larger words.

End Game Hints

Towards the end of a puzzle, hints become effectively useless. There may be a number of two letter words available, and a hint is going to only point you towards the primary solution. If there is a slot for a two letter word, and the first letter is an S, you could have so many options. SB: Antimony, SC: Scandium or South Carolina, SD: South Dakota, SE: South East or Selenium, SG: Seaborgium, SH: Shipping & Handling or noise for be quiet, SI: Silicon or System International (metric units), SM: Small or Samarium, SN: Tin, SO: conjunction, SR: Senior or Strontium, ST: Street, and SW: South west. Only one of these is going to be in the preferred solution that hints push towards, but the final solution will accept all of them. When they're actually interchangeable for a final solution, the hint means nothing.

Specific Hints

In a very convoluted way, it is possible to identify an unknown cell definitively, however it may take many hints to do so. You may tap a cell and see all the possible letters in the entry point. After placing a letter, you can verify whether it is correct or not.

Hint Timing

When first opening the board, there is a 15 second timer on using a hint. This time is meant to force you to study the board and not just immediately spam a bunch of hints. Afterwards, there is a hint cooldown between each successive use of hints to prevent solving by just spamming the hint button. However, we don't want you to be excessively punished for using hints. Therefore, the cooldown after applying the first hint is just one second. Each hint increases the cooldown by half a second. There is also a maximum cooldown on hints of 15 seconds. These numbers are subject to change, but this feels like a healthy balance to prevent abuse, make using a hint feel valuable, and not severely punishing for particularly difficult puzzles.

• I intend this to eventually be available on iOS and Android. I've never developed for iOS before.
• I'm just one person. I'm fully employed. This is a side-project. Please be patient.
• There are no servers or databases (I'm cheap)
• The only proof of completing a puzzle is taking a screenshot.
• Every time I show people, they manage to do things you shouldn't be able to do, like put the same letter in a column multiple times. I am unable to reproduce this issue on my phone in chrome, firefox, and safari. If it behaves weird... all I can say is I'm sorry.