I was today years old when I learned that the word conclave—as in the assembly of cardinals that just gave us Pope Leo XIV—comes from the Latin for key, clavis, because they’re locked in a room.  They’re locked inside.  The Sistine Chapel is the world’s nicest escape room!

White smoke signal fire escape room

Compound Your Joy just turned one year old.  CYJ is our daily game that asks you to rearrange a list of words to form a sequence of overlapping 2-word phrases, thereby connecting two “endpoint” words.  For example, you might be asked to connect “alligator” and “shark”, the purple words below, with the green ones:

To win this one, you need to recognize that the phrases “alligator clip”, “clip art”, “art glass”, “glass eye”, “eye rolling”, “rolling paper”, “paper tiger”, and “tiger shark” are all things.  If you order them that way you will connect “alligator” and “shark”, like so:

As toys go, CYJ is closer to a fidget spinner than a Rubik’s cube.  Most CYJ games take no more than a few seconds, and you can easily fumble your way to the right answer without knowing what you’re doing.  But there’s a meditative quality that leads some people to play dozens or hundreds of puzzles in one sitting.  My hope is that they’re learning some new phrases in the process—the “Meanings” button that appears on the win screen explains what each phrase means.

If you’re up for a challenge, you can try to get the answer in the designated number of swaps, which can require a bit of forethought.  If you succeed at this you’ll see fireworks when you win.

Ever more joy:  CYJ variations

Unscrambling is a common motif in word games.  CYJ can be seen as a variation of Jumble, the newspaper scrambled-word game that goes back to the 1950s.  And it has a few variations of its own that you might enjoy.

The first is called definition mode.  You’re given a word on the left side and, instead of forming phrase pairs, you’re asked to make a short definition of the word from the green words:

Finally, I recently added emoji mode.  It’s like the original phrase-linking game but with pictures.  Can you connect the eagle and the mouse below?

(Hint:  A dogwatch is an evening shift aboard a naval ship.   If you’re unsure of any other phrases, try looking them up on OneLook!).  First email responder gets a handsome OneLook mug.

Pandergram update

Pandergram, another OneLook game that we covered previously, is decidedly not a fidget spinner.  Very few people solve the “hard” mode of the weekly puzzle.   By popular request, I’ve added a hint button to the game.  The button reveals a possible “end state”, that is, a configuration of words that satisfies the criterion that all of the letters of the alphabet are present.  You still need to figure out how to get to that configuration.   More improvements to Pandergram are coming soon thanks to the excellent feedback I’ve received from readers.

Word games from around the Web

• Quadral:  A neat AI-adjacent game, this is my only discovery of note this week.  The tagline has a vibe I can get behind: “One Word. Four Constraints. No Explanation.”   You’re given multiple constraints and you have to guess a word that simultaneously satisfies all of them.  You’re then judged by an AI model and placed on a leaderboard if your scores make the grade.  For example, Quadral 12, includes constraints like “used by writers”, “relevant to the military”, and “heard at a pub”.   Draft is considered the “par” answer, and it was hard for me to think of a better word than that.   (I tried alcoholism but the bot did not reward my cheekiness and I did not make it to the leaderboard.  It said “alcoholism” was deemed least relevant to “heard at a pub” compared to the other constraints, which seems off to me.  I know from experience that these AI models have a hard time with quantitative judgments like this.   I think this game will be even more fun when the AI models behind them improve—that is to say, when I get a good score.)

  
  

That’s all for now!  Until next time, may your joy compound every day!

Doug @ OneLook