Remember Wordle?
The word game captivated the world with daily puzzles, reaching popularity between 2021 and 2022 when sharing personal scores became commonplace on the internet.
Binoy Mascarenhas also found himself fascinated with the simple but challenging game. In fact, it became a family challenge for Mascarenhas and his wife and 8-year-old daughter.
"Playing Wordle daily reignited something that had been dormant within me for many years – a passion for puzzles and strategic games," the Vancouverite tells V.I.A.
That passion turned into Mascarenhas creating a new word game called Quintumble that, up until writing this, has been played over 36,000 times at an average of close to 1,000 games a day.
Like Wordle, his game also employs word-based puzzles. It's played on a five by five grid with 25 randomly distributed letters. The objective is to make five words, one in each row, by rearranging the letters in each column. Every puzzle has a unique solution.
While it took Mascarenhas two weeks to develop the idea for Quintumble, it took him four months to translate the game from paper to computer.
"At the time, computer programming was a completely new field for me," he says, explaining that he first had to learn the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript -- the essential building blocks of a website -- before learning tools and techniques for developing Quintumble. "I am incredibly grateful to [the] Vancouver Public Library, from where I sourced almost all my learning material."
The self-taught computer programmer moved to Vancouver with his wife from India in 2019, and despite a career in urban planning, Mascarenhas' interest in coding dates back to his early 20s. It wasn't until the summer of 2022 that he decided to take the plunge and make a personal goal to become proficient in at least one computer language, resulting in the making of Quintumble.
With no app available, Quintumble can only be played online. Players can also chat with each other and share their scores on Quintumble's Facebook page and Twitter.
