Question of the day.

Do you ever fill out sudoku, crossword puzzles, or word finds for fun?

My answer:

I really love playing with words and that includes word games but I actually don’t play them very often or if I do, it’s most often just in my brain. There are a lot of accessible word games in English, but I haven’t come across any in Polish, though perhaps I just haven’t looked deep enough. I don’t think I’ve ever played sudoku at all, for example. Crossword puzzles I don’t play on my own, but often when someone in my family is playing they’ll ask me for help and I’m happy to join in. My grandad also loves playing with words and is a real crossword puzzle maniac and back when we lived in the country and shared the backyard with my Mum’s family I’d often do them with him and he would always get real mad and sulky when I solved something quicker than he did. He would also give me some random challenges, inspired by something he was thinking about, like, what word has three ó’s in it? And then I’d be thinking for hours, steam going from my brains. Ever since I was a relatively young child, whenever I’d go somewhere with Mum that involved waiting, like to the doctor or something, or on long rides, and especially if any other of my siblings was there too, my Mum would encourage us to play things like anagrams or creating as many different words as possible from one given word, to kill the time. She’d find a word on some sign or something and we’d have to make up anagrams from it if there were any or think of as many words as possible that could be made with the letters in this word. It’s a good distraction indeed and I particularly liked it because I would usually find more words than my siblings or often even than my Mum and they’d get frustrated cus there were no words left for them lol. Sofi doesn’t like this game because she claims it’s impossible to play without writing down the word. But there’s something in my brain that makes it very automatic for me to analyse words kind of in the background and I do it nearly all the time so it’s easy for me. When Sofi’s really bored, she still likes to play the alphabet game with either Mum or me and it’s fun, especially if you have lots of challenging categories.

Now that I have my iPhone, I’ve also started playing some English-language word games, but because English isn’t my first language and my vocabulary in it is limited and also not quite as deeply rooted as Polish, I’m not quite as good at it, and it sort of frustrates me because I’m used to being very good at these things. I’ll play these games sometimes when I have nothing to do and need some distraction. Currently I have three word games on my phone which are Ordet (where you get some random letters and have to create as many words as you can using them), 7 Little Words (which has word puzzles but they’re not exactly crosswords), and Blindfold Words From Words (which is much like what Mum played with us – you’re given a word and have to create as many different words from it as you can, this game is no longer really developed but was made by a developer who did all sorts of equivalents of popular games for the blind, but that could also be played by sighted people).

You? 🙂