Some of you may remember our blog post from March where we shared a recap of our games and a list of ideas we were exploring for the future. One of those ideas was a brand new daily word puzzle. Back then we were still deciding what shape it should take. Today we are happy to say that the decision is made, the prototype is playable on our screens and we can finally tell you a bit more about it.
We don't have the final name yet because we keep changing it every week. The current working name is Pop'N'Drop. Because that's what the letters do in game. But we can already explain how the game works and why we are excited about it.
How the new word game works
The game is played on a 5x5 grid filled with letters. That part is familiar to every Smartle player. The difference is in what you do with those letters. Instead of swapping and rearranging them like in our daily word puzzle you connect them. You start on one letter and drag through neighbouring letters to trace a word. If the word is valid, it lights up with green, you release and the letters you used disappear from the grid. When letters disappear, the letters above them fall down to fill the empty spaces and brand new letters drop from the top of the grid. The board is never empty and never the same. Every word you create literally reshapes the playing field and the next opportunities depend on what falls in.
The game essentially is - spot a word, connect it, watch the new letters fall down and start searching again. Easy to learn in ten seconds.
How it is different from Smartle
Smartle daily word puzzle gives you a fixed set of 25 letters each day and the goal is to rearrange letters to form five valid 5-letter words. You can take your time, undo, rethink and enjoy the quiet satisfaction of a completed grid. The new daily word game has the opposite kind of energy. The board keeps refreshing itself, so there is no single solution to find. It is about flow rather than completion. Words can also be shorter or longer than five letters, which opens the door to quick little wins or the big satisfying finds - each player can choose what suits them the best.
We think two word games will complement each other nicely. We decided that Pop'N'Drop will also have all modes that Smartle daily word puzzle has - Daily, Sprint and Archive.
Why we are making it
We missed making word games. Hex Sense and Clean are hexagonal logic puzzles and we love them but daily word puzzles are where this whole journey started. Many of you have told us the same thing in our Discord: you would happily play more free browser word games if we made them.
Like everything we make, we want it to be good for your brain and cognitive abilities - scanning for patterns, recalling vocabulary and planning ahead is a proper little brain workout. We also think that a daily format creates a nice ritual. However, we were not sure about the leaderboard, because in Smartle it's easy to rank players in the leaderboard and make it fair. Because everyone plays the exact same letters. In the new game the field will start the same for everyone but then evolve to be unique per player. Depending on how they play and which words they form and which letters are going away from the board and which letters are appearing. For now we decided to base the leaderboard on time and also on word length. The shorter the time and the longer the words that you create - the better.
Tell us what you think in our Discord server. Would you prefer a daily word puzzle format, an endless mode, or both? And if you have a great idea for the name, we are all ears, because as we mentioned, we still need help with that. Or maybe you like the Pop'N'Drop working name?