Odd Couple from the Outback turns Ancient Word Game into iPhone Classic

Trying to find a newsworthy angle to push in first press release for Crosswords/Downwords...


ODD COUPLE FROM OUTBACK TURNS ANCIENT WORD GAME INTO IPHONE CLASSIC

They live in the Australian bush and call themselves "Sly Fox Productions". She trains horses. He plays with computers. "To tell the truth, Lee's not much good around the farm", Frances confides, "so he has to make himself useful in other ways. Writing iPhone applications seems an obvious choice."

The game itself is a variation on the "word square". They have been around for thousands of years - letters arranged into a square, so that words are formed across and down simultaneously. These squares have been found beneath the volcanic ash that buried ancient Pompeii, and were once believed to have strange powers. Lee made his own, less profound, discovery... word squares are fun!

Imagine that you are confronted with a word square, three letters across by three letters down, in which all the letters have been shuffled about... can you uncover the hidden word square? Can you rearrange the letters so that every row and every column of letters makes a word... *simultaneously*? This is the basis of the game that Lee and Frances created. It combines elements of crosswords and anagrams, but also involves the spatial manipulation of a Rubik's Cube or classic sliding puzzle.

"It's like trying to untangle six interlocking anagrams all at once!", says Lee. "When I showed the first puzzle to Frances, she couldn't do it, and neither could I. It was the only one I had, and there were no clues. It took me hours to solve. I couldn't believe that a tiny 3x3 square - just nine letters - could be so difficult."

"I was hopeless at them in the beginning", admits Frances, "but I am improving. We realised pretty quickly that solving a 3x3 word square with no clues is a task for advanced word puzzlers, so our goal was to make that basic word square puzzle accessible to everyone, from young children to adult experts. We solved the problem of providing clues, but then we ran into the more fundamental problem with any word game - the *vocabulary*. We want people to able to play this game even if they have never heard of the word KEA or LOY, but we also want to give something meaty to all those Scrabble champions out there."

After much experimentation, Lee found the answer - allow *multiple* solutions. A carefully designed puzzle could have a simple solution, with elementary vocabulary, but also allow *other* solutions, involving more obscure words. So the puzzle can be solved by young kids, while advanced players with richer vocabularies, have more solutions available to them. "It's pretty clever", says Frances.

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