Quote Games

Well, I've done it again. I finished (is anything ever really finished?) writing another game. This one's even pretty fun. It's great for when you don't want to have to think, but you'd like to think you're learning something or doing something productive.

It's actually composed of five separate games, all centered around famous quotations. There are nearly 9,000 quotations that will come up randomly. And at this point I have to say that I haven't personally read all the quotations. Some may be offensive to some people (although I hope not) and some may have spelling errors that would make it difficult to solve the puzzle. Just consider that part of the experience, I guess.

The first game is the one that will pop up when you first start. It's called PLUMMETGRAM. If you do those variety puzzle books you've probably seen it as Wordfall or some other similar name.

The quotation is stripped of punctuation and laid out in a grid. The letters are removed and suspended above the grid. Your job is to drop the letters into the correct spot to complete the quotation. Clicking on a letter will drop it into the next available space, or you can drag the letter into place, or you can type the letter (it will drop into the highlighted space), or hold control and press the down arrow. You can move around the puzzle by clicking on a space, using the arrow keys, or rolling the mouse wheel. You can play the whole game with as little effort as moving a single finger on the mouse.

There are 5 skill levels for each game. For this one, the skill level changes the number of rows, thus increasing the difficulty. The Novice level has 3 rows, the Wizard has 7 (you can probably figure out the rest from there). There are also 2 helps at the top of the screen: Show Hint drops a random piece into place, and Cheat highlights the pieces in red or green to show what you have correct and what you screwed up.
In case it's not obvious, you can click on the part of the screen on the right that says "More Games" to see the other options. Or, if you don't feel like clicking, just hover over there for a second; it'll pop up.

The second game is just a regular CRYPTOGRAM, where each letter is represented by another letter. All the punctuation will still be included in the quotation, and you get the extra benefit of seeing the author's name (well, you have to solve that, too, but it can help).

There will always be one space selected in bright green, and all the other occurences of that letter will be highlighted in a darker green. You can move around by clicking on a space, clicking on the top part of the key at the bottom, or spinning the mouse wheel (which can be really fun). Enter a letter by typing it on the keyboard or clicking the lower portion of the key at the bottom.

The third game also appears in some puzzle books. I call it PSEUDOGRAM. In this game, all the letters are represented by a number, and the difficulty level determines how many letters are represented by the same number. The Novice level uses 13 numbers to represent all the letters (that's 2 letters per number, if you're keeping track). The Wizard level uses 5 numbers to represent all the letters (that's 5 letters per number, and 6 letters for the number 1).

To fill in letters, just type them from the list of available letters below each space. In this example, the first letter is selected, and you can either type J or W. If you prefer, you can just click the letters instead. If you get stumped on a word and want to return to it later, just click on a space in a different word and it will let you work on that one.

The next (or fourth, if you're keeping track) puzzle is the JIGSAWGRAM. It's really pretty simple. It takes a quote, writes it on a piece of paper, cuts it into pieces, and scrambles those pieces. All you have to do is put the scattered pieces on the right into the right order in the boxes on the left.

The difficulty level defines how many pieces there are. On the Novice level, it draws a 3x3 grid. On the wizard leve, it grows to 8x8. I'll let you figure out the ones in between.

The last (or fifth) game is what I call a CLUSTERGRAM. I've seen these in some puzzle books, but only really hard puzzle books. In the puzzle books, they only have clusters of 3 letters. That's really too difficult to be fun, if you ask me. So in my version, the Novice level has clusters of 7 letters, and the Wizard has clusters of 3.

In this game, the quotation has been cut up into equal-sized pieces. The only catch is that the letters in the pieces don't include spaces or punctuation. You have to use the spaces and punctuation in the blank spaces to determine where each piece should go. To make it easier (or does it make it harder?), the name of the author is part of each puzzle. Just drag and drop the pieces into place.

Where can you get this game, you ask? For being a reader of my blog, you can get your own copy by logging into my special ymail account set up just for that purpose. Go to http://www.yahoo.com/, click on Mail, then enter the following information to log in:

Username: softwaredan@ymail.com
Password: soft123

If fact, you could even just cut and paste from here. Then, just find the e-mail titled: "Quote Games", open it up, download the file, put it somewhere you won't forget it (the desktop works well), and play.

All I ask is that you let me know what you think of it, and tell me if you find anything not working right, or that could be done better. Or, if you don't want to tell me what you think, that's okay too. I'd rather you play it and not tell me than not play it so you don't feel obligated to send me a message. Either way.