Simply Puzzles: Codewords

Just buy Ink Cipher instead. The idea is the same, but Simply Puzzles: Codewords costs more for fewer puzzles. The interface is a lot less friendly; the all-white tiles make it hard to hunt down the last several singleton letters in a grid, and the controls don't support a drag-and-drop or a keyboard-only input method. Most importantly, the puzzles... just aren't that fun to solve. In Ink Cipher the 15x15 grid, plus the titles on each puzzle, allows the setter to occasionally build around a theme. A puzzle can be crafted around a certain phrase, or a unique and surprising shape. The smaller, nameless 13x13 grids here don't really allow for that playfulness, or for very good word choice. Every other puzzle has to make use of a proper noun, and several words start showing up multiple times; I saw "XMAS" at least three times, once as "XMASES". C'mon. In Ink Cipher, when I solved the puzzles, I had an "a-ha!" moment, or even laughed out loud. Here I just sort of felt glad they were over...

It needs a 'show mistake' or a hint button otherwise you'll never get it.

It's like playing the daily newspaper crossword puzzle without the hints. I only have about 12 puzzles done in 3.8 hours, since I had to learn the game. It becomes simple once you can see words, but sometimes your mind tricks you and you need to move a letter here, and there, and eventually the word "guard" becomes "waned." I highly recommend it if you enjoy doing puzzles such as sudoku, crossword, picross, etc. Also, the developer is very nice, as they left me a comment on Reddit. I am definitely looking forward to playing more of their games!

for a fill-a-few minutes type game I would recommend it, though at present, less than halfway through, the puzzles do seem a bit easy - once you have one word correctly placed, the rest soon fall in without much thinking - but it is what it is and somehow I have frittered away four hours playing it on and off in the last two days. For the price I think it is worth it.

Simple, fun, relaxing. Wish it had dark mode.

This game is a great pick-up-and-play/leave it running in the background game! It is simple yet challenging enough to keep it interesting. Almost every puzzle starts out hard so you'll need to spend time thinking about word patterns. Then in the middle it gets easier as you fill in the remaining letters... then at the end you'll either need to find the box that is still missing a letter and/or fixing mistakes ("was that supposed to be jest or zest?") . I think the inability to easily find the missing box is a bit of a UI issue. When only one or two or left, they can be a bit tricky to find. I'm not too convinced that a 'find my mistake' button is critical. Maybe on a timer or counter or something (e.g., all letters are filled in and only two or wrong or something). BTW--the native Linux support is greatly appreciated!

inexpensive and challenging way to pass the time

I love word puzzles and this is a very nice one. It has the right combination of being a challenge without being too extreme and impossible to figure out. The user face is simple and calming.

Got this extremely cheap on sale, so I'm not gonna bother asking for a refund, but this one is a disappointment. There are a hundred different "hand-crafted" puzzles to solve, but wow - even in the first few puzzles there are some really strange words (including proper nouns); this game would have been more fun if the grids had been of more common words (a six-letter word ending in "I"? Seriously?). For me, there were few, if any, of these puzzles that were an enjoyable difficulty. They either were simply impossible for me (not being able to recognize even one word based on the letters given) or else trivially easy (I could recognize a starting word or two, then the rest just fell into place). I guess it was tricky for the developers, because each grid had to contain words that used all twenty-six letters of the alphabet, and so they ended up using some pretty strange words. On the plus side, you can easily select any of the one hundred puzzles, so if you get stuck on one, you ca...

Difficult, yet relaxing. Something a little different for those who enjoy word games.