Wordcels the game celebrates people who love words and especially two-word expressions.

The term wordcels comes from internet memes.

For several years the term "shape rotator" was used to poke fun at people with high visualspatial skills. Shape rotators may be able to rotate 3D objects in their heads and construct amazing contraptions, but have trouble with people and might use the wrong "there" in their writing. Some might think, Nikola Tesla.



In 2021 a user of X (then twitter) named Roon coined a term for the "opposite" type who skew heavily to high verbal intelligence. He dubbed them, wordcels. Wordcels may be great writers, speakers or leaders of people, but may fail to accomplish practical tasks in the real world. Some might think, Alexander Hamilton.



The 'cel' ending of wordcel derives from another internet meme reflecting frustration of not getting something one feels they deserve. The rise of tech jobs and concurrent loss of revenue in many journalistic fields, left some 'wordcels' frustrated they were earning less than peers who could write some computer code.


Whether you are a shape rotator, a wordcel, or some balanced mix of the two, wordcels the game welcomes you with a daily puzzle. Wordcels companion, the t-shirt puzzle, does the same from the shape rotation end of the spectrum. Enjoy.

• Moves are counted? As is life, as is wordcels - some people like to keep score. Wordcels scoring is based on the number of moves you make to get to the solution. The fewer the moves, the better the score. To see your move count set Move Counts to "Always" in Settings.
  
  If you don't care about score, set Move Counts to "no biggie" in Settings and just enjoy the solve.
  
  
• How moves are counted When a word that is on the Game Board (the upper portion of the screen) is moved to another cell in the Game Board or back to the Word Bank (the lower portion of the screen), one move is counted.
  
  If each word dragged from the Word Bank to the Game Board lands in the correct position on first try, you can obtain a perfect score of zero.
  
  If one word on the Game Board is placed on top of another word on the Game Board, the two words swap places, and one move is counted. Swapping Game Board words with Word Bank words costs one move.
  
  If a triplet (three words that go together as a group) is moved, it counts as one move.
  
  Using the slider bars on the right-side of each row, you can slide an entire row, containing zero to five words, up (or down), pushing one or both other rows down (or up) at cost of one move.
  
  
• Organize words in the Word Bank first. All the words start out below the Game Board in an area called the Word Bank. You can move words around in the Word Bank without any cost in moves. A great way to get a lower score is to organize words in the Word Bank first.
  
  Start by finding word pairs and put them together. Then look for the words that really only pair with one other word.
  
  Then see if you can find three, two-word pairs that can be arranged vertically so they make common two-word phrases going down as well. If you can, then move those three up into the Game Board in a column with an arrow above it.
  
  

• Use the progress indicators (or lack thereof). Sometimes you will put three words down in a row on the game board, and you just KNOW that these words form great, two-word expressions (e.g. grateful dead, dead center). Despite this, they don't form a triplet (don't become a colored group that moves together) when you put them on the Game Board.
  
  It means one of the three words doesn't go with the others as part of the overall puzzle solution. There are often two-word pairs that make a totally common and valid two-word expression, but are not part of the solution because the whole puzzle has to fit together.
  
  It may be that one of words forms multiple pairs. It may be one or more of the words will make a pair going vertically in column 2 or 4, instead of horizontally (e.g. "dead last" going horizontally and "dead center" going vertically).
  
• Look for left-handed and right-handed words. These are words that probably pair with something after them, but not before, or vice versa.
  
  For example, if you see "Pandora's" you can probably guess the word "box" comes next (Pandora's box). It is highly unlikely there will be another word before Pandora's, so it must go in the left-most column.
  
  On the other hand if you see a word like "processor" it's probably going to go in the far right column, with a word like "word" in front of it (word processor).
  
  As a rule of thumb, the longer a word is, the more likely it is to be left or right-handed. A 10 letter word in a wordcels puzzle has a 90% chance of being left or right-handed. Start every puzzle by looking for the longest words.
  
  
• Super Words go in the middle. A Super Word is a very promiscuous word that pairs with lots of other words in both directions.
  
  For example, "dead" can be followed by both "center", "last". And dead can be preceded by both "grateful" and "living".
  
  Therefore it's a good bet "dead" is one of the two key Super Words in columns 2 and 4 of the middle row. But be careful. Some puzzles have up to 6 Super Words.