Changes

I have an admission to make - I am addicted to word games. I regularly play Scrabble online and I'm on [http://www.playbabble.com/ Babble] every day. There are a couple of snags though: you need a partner (one at the very least!) to play Scrabble and it's not particularly portable. Babble's great fun but it doesn't stretch the mind quite as much as it might once you master the range of words which the Enable dictionary uses. I was in search of something different when I was pointed in the direction of The Chosen Word.

The principle is simple - but it can be fiendishly difficult to master. You're given a range of vertical words, with the longest in the first column and the shortest in the last. At the top of each column is an empty box. One letter must be selected from each word and this is then put in the box at the head of the column in such a way that all the letters form another word. One of the vertical words is a clue and this can be by association, definition or example. Let me give you one of the examples which author Colin Fantham shows: