Every morning as you scroll through Twitter or WhatsApp, amidst the jumble of Wordle scores that people share, you can see a few Stackle Fun scores.

The world’s favourite obsession currently may be the runaway hit word game Wordle, but two IIT-Madras alumni Prashanth Pappu and Sumant Kowshik based in the US are gamely trying to promote their more challenging offering, Stackle Fun, that again treads the five-letter route.

The golden goal

Unlike the plethora of Wordle clones, Stackle Fun is a bit different. In this, the challenge is to build the tallest stack pile of words by rearranging and changing one letter in each try. The best possible stackle is 22 words — the golden goal. Over time, the game has been getting progressively more difficult as the usage of certain letters is limited.

The duo, who grew up solving daily crosswords in newspapers with their families, believe that “we are on the cusp of a new generation of daily word games”.

“With digital growth, people are getting siloed in their news reading and puzzle solving routines. Our primary goal is to revive the shared experiences of solving daily word games,” they say.

But with Wordle already such a hit, why did they feel the need to create another word game? “We believe the game is too trivial for many word lovers who prefer the challenge of crosswords and scrabble. Stackle has been designed to be challenging like Sudoku,” they say.

Regular Stackle Fun solvers do agree. “If Wordle is like fast food, Stackle is like a three-course meal. Wordle provides instant gratification but is somewhat dependent on the luck of the draw. On the other hand, Stackle is for serious players and is both absorbing and challenging,” says Sowmya Ramkumar, a chartered financial analyst who sets the cryptic crossword for The Hindu as Hypatia.

Management professional T Shrikanth is another daily player of Stackle Fun. “The core idea of the game is simple and easy to play. But placing challenges like limiting usage of letters makes you think like chess — a few moves ahead,” he says.

But both Ramkumar and Shrikanth doubt whether the game will have a mass following like Wordle though.

More takers

However, the Stackle Fun creators say that within the first few weeks of launching it they had 100,000 users playing it. They plan to get celebrities as guest setters to grow its popularity — for instance, one Sunday, Renuka Shahane set the game.

Pappu who is the founder of a streaming video company called Vizbee, and Kowshik, who is a machine learning engineer at Apple, say they do not have any plans to monetise the game, and fondly recall their IIT-M days which had a great culture of challenging word games and quizzes. “We are strongly driven by the need to revive community experiences around daily word games,” they say.

comment COMMENT NOW