Upcoming Puzzler ‘Losswords’ Has a Very Novel Premise

Often times the best moments for gaming and Kickstarter arrive when the crowd-funding platform is used to help fund bizarre ideas that could have never obtained suitable financing any other way. That’s certainly what Local No. 12 — the same people behind The Metagame did with Losswords, a game challenging players to preserve literary masterpieces in an otherwise dystopian future. Although they requested a mere $5,000 with which to further develop their current iOS prototype, Kickstarter’s community was so impressed with Local No. 12’s plans that they pledged an entire $8,670 instead!

The game itself is broken into two main phases: Losswords, in which a selected passage is encrypted by one player; and then Solving, in which a totally-different player will have to reassemble the previously-scrambled passage. The Losswords phase is carried out by players encoding a message for safe transmission, which is done by removing letters from all the words in a passage (with the caveat being the leftovers must still be valid words). After which — during the Solving phase — a different player, whom is randomly selected, will be tasked with re-integrating the removed-letters so as to restore the passage to its original form (and with over 200 open-source books offered, the puzzles will be endless).

Although — at this particular juncture — it’s perhaps quite-a-bit too late to be aiding Lossword’s Kickstarter, you can still engage in revolutionary book editing yourself once Local No. 12’s latest-project releases sometime early next year.