If you’ve played other anagramming games for any length of time, you’ve noticed how repetitive they get. After all, how many times can you type in: eat, ate, tea, eta, tae… before your eyes roll back in your head and you begin to hear voices telling you to hurt the people you love?
With Maranga, the challenge is different: Take a bag of 100 random letters and organize them into real words - the longer the better - with no tiles left over. Three strikes (illegal words) and you’re out. Sounds simple enough, right? But “simple” is not the same as “easy,” and beginners will find plenty of challenge just finishing a game, let alone worrying about high scores.
I wrote the first version of Maranga in 2010 and have been play-testing it pretty much daily since then. The next phase of the project is to finally deal with a few minor wrinkles and get it released.
As I waltz my way around the chaotic orbits of HappySkunk, WebSmith, and Maranginator, I’m getting an ever-clearer picture of how each of the systems will work with the others. One of the keys will be to design an attractive promo card for each day’s challenge; something that carries the necessary details, encourages people to share them, and gets full value from that sharing, if it happens.
I’ve said before that I’m aiming to make Creativity Hacker my only online presence, and in addition to “no social media,” I also mean, “no newsletter,” but I still want to run some sort of regular puzzle club for Maranga users. Here’s how I’m going to make that happen.