🎮 Knotwords (2022) - ★★★★★

Knotwords poster

Knotwords is a nice iOS puzzle game. I like that there’s no subscription, you buy it once and that’s it. It’s a kind of crossword combined with anagrams sort of word puzzle. Every day there are 3 new puzzles to solve: Daily Mini which is quick and easy, Daily Classic which starts off quite small and simple on a Monday and gets more difficult as the week goes on, and Daily Twist which gives you an extra set of clues in the form of telling you how many vowels are in each row and column.

There’s also a ‘puzzle book’ section which gives you 60 puzzles each month.

If you use an external keyboard you can use the arrow keys and the tab key to navigate around the board and of course you can type in your answers. I really like this bit as it feels very fast and fluid to enter letters, there’s no fighting with the interface while you’re actually trying to see if your idea is right or not.

Finally the coolest thing is you get an almost Wordle-like animation to share after you’ve solved a puzzle which I think is awesome even though I don’t actually use it:

A gif showing a crossword-style grid. Animated so that the boxes steadily fill with ticks to show when a correct letter is entered or a cross to show an incorrect letter. The overall effect shows the progress made when completing a puzzle without giving away the actual solution