Welcome to issue #3 of the OneLook newsletter!

This week we’ll look at our second most popular game, Threepeat, which has a very simple premise: Fill in the blanks with letters that are the same on each row to form three valid words.  For example:

In the puzzle above, the letters W and I complete all three words—wisdom, window, and within—so you’d type “WI” to move to the next round. Do this for three progressively harder sets of words and you’ve successfully done a Threepeat!

There’s no time limit, but if you’d like a challenge you can play for speed.  The clock starts ticking from the moment you start typing in round 1 and it stops when you complete round 3.  After tens of thousands of plays, we’ve found that people take a median of 40 seconds to solve all three rounds, but there’s a wide range of times that depends on the player and the puzzle.  About 1% of players take only 5 seconds to get through all three rounds!

The hardest round we’ve offered so far is this one from the third round of November 29’s puzzle.  It took people an average of 2 minutes to figure it out:

A hint (the first missing letter) is available, but only after you make a wrong guess.  Using it adds a minute to your time.  There’s also a free “cryptic clue” that appears below the puzzles, tying the words together without revealing them.  The fastest players don’t use these clues, but they can be helpful in the final round if you’re stuck.

Give up on the Threepeat above?  The answer’s at the end of this email.

This week’s contest for readers—for a handsome OneLook coffee mug or an equivalent gift card—is to solve any Threepeat puzzle in 5 seconds or less!   Reply with a screenshot of the win screen.   If you can’t do it with today’s puzzle, there’s an archive of the past few months for you to try.  (And hey:  It doesn’t count if you replay a puzzle you’ve already played. I’m trusting you on this. Sort of. Because I’ll know.)

Pandergram

Last issue’s contest was for our new game, Pandergram, and we offered a prize for solving the “hard” version of that week’s puzzle. Congratulations to Pranav of New York City for being the first to get it.  

Pandergram asks you to change one letter at a time in five words—making only valid words with each change—until all letters from A to Z are represented at least once.  Here is the starting board from the contest, which was only missing H, J, and W:

There were many possible paths to success, but one solution is to get the top word to cover J and W with the word “JAWLS” or “JAWED”. This can be achieved, for example, by changing YARDS to BARDS to BARES to BARED to PARED to PAWED to JAWED.    We lost a Y in the process, so changing FLEXIBLE to FLEXIBLY restores it.   Finally, to get an H, we can turn SICKLES to HACKLES  (SICKLES→TICKLES→TACKLES→HACKLES).  

Around the Web

Bracket City has you solving crossword-style clues in bracketed bits of text, revealing a daily quote after you’ve made all the brackets disappear.  You’ll need to play it in order to see what I mean.

Infinite Word Search isn’t a full-fledged game yet, just an infinite grid of random letters, but I think the concept has a lot of promise.  It’s kind of relaxing to find occasional bits of order in the chaos.  I wonder what this would look like if the randomness were more constrained, or if this were a multiplayer experience.  The author is asking for feedback on Reddit if you’re so inclined.

Rhyme or Reason is definitely up my alley!   It asks you to connect two provided words with a chain of additional words, alternating between rhyming and “related”.  For example, to connect peach and chair, the chain peach→pit→sit→chair is a valid answer, because pit is related to peach, sit is related to chair, and pit and sit rhyme with each other.   This game hasn’t stuck with me yet but I’m bookmarking it to come back to regularly.  

That’s all for issue #3.  Take care, all, and see you next time!

Doug @ OneLook

p.s.:  The answer to the Threepeat above is FAC:   factor, facet, facility.