Under an oak-beamed ceiling on the top floor of one of Washington, D.C.'s coolest museums, Planet Word, more than 90 kids gathered last April to vie for $5,000 and youth Scrabble bragging rights. The North American School Scrabble Championship is serious business. The No. 1 high-school seed was ranked in the top 150 of all players in the U.S. and Canada.
Cryptics are beautiful and rich puzzles but are notoriously hard to learn. We wanted to make a game that captures the joy of solving cryptics while making them more accessible to everyone.
The day Josh Wardle sold Wordle to the New York Times, in 2022, for more than a million dollars, should have been a moment of triumph. The game, which gives players six chances to guess a five-letter word, had unexpectedly become a global sensation, and Wardle had already begun to receive e-mails from puzzle designers seeking his input on their own ideas.
Prevost said that he had asked if his brother had watched the Hollywood blockbuster "Conclave" before the start of the papal summit to "know how to behave."
