Wordle creator Josh Wardle, with help from a few others, has just launched his next word-based puzzle game. And unlike Wordle, which was extremely simple and easy to learn, Wardle’s new game, Parseword, can take some effort to wrap your head around. But fans of cryptic crosswords will be right at home.
Available today for free, Parseword is a daily, digital spin on cryptic crosswords, a type of word puzzle that has been popular in the United Kingdom for over a century now, but which has never made the leap to the United States, where the “concise” crossword is still king. Concise crosswords offer vague clues that rely on you solving other clues to confirm if you picked the correct word or not. For example, as Parseword‘s tutorial explains, the clue “A four-letter word for got up” could be either woke or rose. You’d have to solve connecting words to verify which answer is desired. In a cryptic crossword, clues contain the answer, and you decipher it via tricky wordplay and rules.
With Parseword, Wardle, who in 2022 sold Wordle to The New York Times for a dollar amount in the low seven figures, is hoping to teach players how to solve cryptic crossword clues, while also focusing on the clues themselves and not the act of filling up an empty board. It is an intriguing concept, even if my American brain, trained by classic crossword clues, is struggling to learn.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Wardle explained that the sudden success of Wordle, and then subsequently selling it off to free himself of the burden of maintaining it, was an exhausting experience. He’d never planned for his little word game, which he created for his partner as a bonding exercise, to blow up into one of the biggest word games of the last 20 years. With the release of Parseword, which is totally free-to-play and has no commercial ambitions at the moment, Wardle is more in control.
“Releasing Parseword is happening more on my own terms, instead of happening to me,” the creator said. Parseword is out now. You can play it for free at Parseword.com.
