News UK - Square Routes

News UK was looking to expand their already extensive arsenal of digital puzzles and they found a newly designed concept for a puzzle called Square Routes and we worked together in making it a great digital game.

The game is quite interesting.

Square Routes offers a great challenge that solvers of both crosswords and sudoku will find enjoyable. The objective is to fit a collection of words into the five-by-five grid so that each word can be spelt out by moving from cell to cell without using diagonal moves. The interesting part is that the number of letters to fit into the grid exceeds the number of available cells, and in order to achieve a correct solution, some of the letters will need to be used more than once sometimes even within the same word. The result is a surprising network of linking words.

In making this a digital game there were challenges in keeping the integrity of the game, but also Digital Marmalade found ways to make the game a more dynamic experience as a digital version than if it was just on paper.

In translating a game from paper to digital there are always compromise to be made, but also very interesting steps can be made to make it more interesting and fun to play it and that’s what we did with Square Routes.

Have a play on The Times puzzle’s section!