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I miss the height of Wordle mania not because of the game itself, which I still play on occasion, but because of the torrent of delightful, experimental browser-based puzzle games that followed in its wake. Worldle, Octordle, Moviedle, Waffle, Who Are Ya?, Cloudle and many, many more were a gold rush of bandwagon jumpers I was fully onboard with.
Scrambled Maps takes me back to those good old days. It bears little relation to Wordle, but it is a browser-based puzzle game that offers one new challenge each day, and it is just as delightful a distraction.
The challenge is simple: a map of a part of the world has been sliced into 18 squares of equal size, and scrambled. You must reconstruct them, piecing together a jigsaw of roads and rivers, train lines and place names.
This is more difficult than it may first seem. Maps have no edges, no corners, no blue sky, no easy footholds familiar to dedicated dissectologist. Instead you match coloured roads, building complexes and green fields, then look closer at road shapes and writing.
In completing my first puzzle, I found tile after tile that linked together, but found it more difficult to position those tiles within the broader image. Did two tiles, which clearly fit together, go in the top right, the bottom left, the middle, or…? It was only after 25 minutes when I realised that I had constructed the map perfectly, but in two reversed halves: the nine tiles on the left belonged on the right, and vice versa.
As I fixed that issue, placing each tile in its correct position, a green border appeared around each one. Ah. The game confirms correct answers as you play. Useful.
Like Wordle, no Scrambled Map seems truly difficult, only more or less time consuming. Like Wordle, it would be easy to cheat with a visit to OpenStreetMap (the source of the map data) or Google Maps. In any case, like Wordle, I’m hooked, and eagerly awaiting each new day’s puzzle.
You can play Scrambled Maps here.