New Collaborative Crossword Game Will Rival Wordle?
Gaming company Hovercats launched Planet Crossword, a community-based collaborative game designed to compete with Wordle.
It’s the beginning of fall and there is so much hope in the air! We’re just coming out of a tough summer economically speaking. And now we have Planet Crossword to pull us through.
So, the tech gods decided to give us some fun online games to capture our attention long enough to make us forget our troubles, at least for a moment or two. Planet Crossword is here! First, we had Wordle–that fun 5-letter word guessing game that became a juggernaut. Then, we had its spinoffs of SWordle, Heardle, Crosswordle, and the most complex one, Octordle.
SWordle was based on Star Wars, Heardle was based on music via Spotify, and one was just incredibly complex. But we loved every minute of these games every day as the website updated only once a day.
One game a day. Players posted their game results on Facebook. Wordle certainly had its moment, but now it’s Planet Crossword’s turn.
Is It Laser Cats? No, it’s Planet Crossword!
Wordle, and all its spinoffs, are slowly fading into but a memory, just in time for a new word game in town–Planet Crossword. Complete with cats in alien ships flying in outer space, the crossword puzzle is offset by stars and visions of the galaxy. Try not to get too immersed because now you have a huge crossword puzzle to solve.
Sounds familiar enough, but Planet Crossword had some tricks up its sleeve. Hovercats, the digital studio behind Planet Crossword, wanted to bring back the idea of community play as the world became very familiar with spaces like Zoom and virtual team meetings. To play the game, competitors can choose to play with a team of strangers online, send a code to invite friends to play, or they can just challenge themselves.
One Big Happy Family
Hoevercats designed the game and its platform to also be played on Discord, Twitch, YouTube Live, or Zoom, allowing for digital and video game influencers to get seamless access just as well as the daily corporate job having participants. It is designed to get as many people playing across as many social channels as possible.
This game works in opposition to how Wordle’s challengers played online and then posted their scores on Social Media. Planet Crossword puts players playing on social media in a collaborative space with others online. It is an extraordinary effort to get all engaged with the digital world by playing together.
Hovercats is comprised of some of the best and most creative minds in online game design today. In fact, according to CNET, the developer of crowdfunding technology worked with high-profile politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders for the 2020 election.
Editors for the game include crossword speed-solving champion Stella Zawistowski, who can finish a New York Times Sunday crossword in less than five minutes. She’s a true celeb within crossword puzzle fandom.
Are you Down With NFTs?
Hovercats has decided to embrace the philosophy of Web3 instead of advertising with spammy ads ala Google and Yahoo. Web3 is like Gen Z in the history of the citizens of the Internet in that it bucks conventionality and embraces decentralization and blockchain and token-based economics.
In Planet Crossword, only one can win and walk away from an auction to own the completed puzzle as an NFT. This is the hallmark of Web3 as non-fungible tokens with unique identifiers such as metadata that distinguish them from each other. As NFTs are brand new status symbols represented by real-world items including pop culture memes and artwork, they can be very sought after to show allegiance to a new way of gameplay and a new way of buying and selling.
