Description of App
Sort scattered words into their hidden groups in Word Tack, a cozy word puzzle with a handmade feel: washi tape, typewriter labels and paper tiles that look cut out by hand.
Every puzzle hides eight groups of five words. Drag tiles between rows, and when a row holds all five words of a group, it's sealed and its category is revealed. There's no timer and no penalty for a wrong guess, so take your time.
PLAY YOUR WAY
• A growing campaign of handcrafted levels, from everyday categories to clever wordplay and real head-scratchers, with more added in updates
• Every level is marked easy, medium or hard
• A Daily Puzzle to play each day, with shareable emoji results and a streak to keep
GENTLE HELP WHEN YOU'RE STUCK
• Inklings link two words from the same group
• Clues reveal the names of up to three groups
• Solve a puzzle without help to earn all three stars
MAKE THE DESK YOUR OWN
• Earn stamps as you play
• Spend them in the shop on washi tape, tile styles, row seals, desk backgrounds and confetti, including dazzling gold and holographic finishes
MADE WITH CARE
• Satisfying sounds, gentle haptics and a soft soundtrack, each with its own setting
• Statistics, star ratings and daily streaks to track your progress
• Works with VoiceOver: hear when rows are solved and where each tile sits on the board
• A Reduce Motion setting for calmer play
• No ads, no in-app purchases and no account needed. Works offline.
Comments
Good game
This is a good game, but I think we should also have the option of double tapping the tiles we wish to swap. Considering we have 40 words to sort in each level, dragging can become tedious. Just my thoughts.
Re: Good game
Agreed. I just played my first level, and I found dragging the tiles to where I wanted them on the first try difficult. It often took me two or three tries to move them where I needed them.
How about using the rotor actions
This game looks really fun but I agree double tapping and dragging adds more frustration than necessary. Could the developer incorperate the use of the rotor actions just like iOS does with rearranging apps on the home screens.
strange thing I noticed
So when I tried to complete a level, I noticed that the row and column number would change on the cards, but not the actual position if that makes sense. So if I tried moving a card from row 3 column 1 to row 1 column 2, it would say it was in row 1 column 2 but it would still show up next to the other row 3 cards.
Moving cards
I think the dev will be adding the option to doubletap and move a card. The drag gesture with VO is a little bit tricky to master, so I understand why some people wouldn't want to use it. I like it when I have the oportunity to do so though, but maybe I am weird.
Lovely game, agreed about the drag!
This game looks very much up my street, but at the moment I truly can't get on with it at all due to the need to drag. If the option was given to double tap, move by rotor, or literally any other method, I would be most grateful and would give this a proper look! It looks fab!
Re: Lovely game, agreed about the drag!
There is no penalty for putting a card in the wrong place and the way things are designed you can't really mess things up that way anyway. As long as the card is grouped with others of it's category it doesn't matter where it's placed. It's designed so you can place things wherever you want them and in whatever order you want them. , so if you want you could give this a try. Even dragging a card is pretty easy because other cards move out of the way as you do, so you shouldn't get stuck trying to drag something and things not moving because something is in the way. There are a lot of games out there that use drag mechanics and it's something voiceover users can totally do on a touchscreen, so don't let that be why you skip out on a game. Of course I'm not trying to say my way of playing is superior because I know not everyone can use the phone the same way. I'm just saying that if you have the dexterity and you don't have any other disabilities, try the game at least and see if you like it.
I did try.
Sorry, I ought to have made this clearer. I did try the game out. Unfortunately I have terrible spatial reasoning and also don't always go in straight lines even when I think I have, and the combination of these two things together meant that I was quite often not moving things to the right places, particularly as there's no feedback for where something is moving. I spent a good ten minutes with it and only managed to get one group of words matched, and while I'm willing to struggle with a game, I would rather that be for game play reasons rather than interface ones.
Thanks for giving the game a try anyways.
Thanks for trying the game. Not everyone is gonna be able to play the same way and that's okay.
I thought I had pretty bad spacial reasoning too. I'm pretty bad at traveling and stuff, but I like to drag and drop to do things like edit my homescreen. I did mention the drag and drop issue to the dev. I'll let them know that I added the game here so they can come see the feedback. I'm sorry you struggled. I usually plan my moves and paths ahead of time and then follow that, but now with everyone struggling here, I kind of feel like I am somehow weird. Lol. I have a lot harder time actually performing the rotor gesture the right way. I can do it, but it's harder to turn the imaginary dial continuously for me.
Drag gesture help and an agreement on a bug.
I have a gesture that may help make things faster untill the dev can add actions or doubletapping.
This will also help in certain scenarios where you want precision movement, like when doing a puzzle, or a sliding game or when you want to quickly create a new folder on your home screen.
If you find it faster to flick to items instead of exploring by touch all the time like I do, then you can drag from where the voiceover cursor was last focused instead of having to find the object directly. The cursor will stay with that item and you'll find it in the new position, still focused on the last focused item at the end
First flick to an item you want to move. Then doubletapand hold like you're doing a longpress, but keep your finger on the screen. Now drag in the direction you want the tile to go and keep your finger there for a sec. Then when you lift your finger, the item you flicked too will be in a position that is in the direction you dragged. Like I said, the cursor will remain with the item even after it's moved, and you can just start flicking from there.
For example, If I want to move a tile of my puzzle to the right, I can flick to it, then do the long press, and drag my finger to the right. The tile I flicked to earlier will move right by a set degree when I lift my finger, so there's no need to hunt for the tile directly, or hunt for the correct position I want it to be in. That's how I play this game. Sometimes I know I want something a row up, so all I have to do is a simple flick to find it, and a drag upward.
There is a bug where for some reason voiceover doesn't register the position change, so it will skip over that space in the grid. THe only way I've found to get around this is to touch where it is. Voiceover will then fix it's positioning for that row. I am not sure if this is a voiceOVer bug, or a game bug, because this happened with multiple apps and my home screen when I got iOS 27, but it's so random I can't always reproduce it.
Drag is too difficult to be fun
There needs to be a way to double tap stuff to move it rather than the dragging thing. I think this would be an extremely fun game if moving words to the right places was easier. Please consider adding a double tap or something else more user friendly.
Dragging
I think it's kind of fun - but I'm the insane person who uses and enjoys an iPad spacially, so I might not be the one to talk here, ☺️.
One thing that might help some is, try dragging sideways on the current line to the column you want then dragging up and down. So for example if the spot you want is on line 1 column 2, and the tile you want to move is on line 4 column 4, drag the one on line 4 left until it's in column two, then go up. Sure, it's two movements, but they're straight.
Honestly, I think this is a great game to actually practice dragging - it's a useful skill on iOS.
Re: Dragging
I do have to agree. I think dragging is a great skill to have if you use a touch screen. I remember when we didn't have the actions rotor or anything like that on iPhone and if you wanted to do stuff like make folders on your iPhone, you had to drag. That was just how things were done. I understand that some people have other disabilities that make dragging difficult, so I'm not talking about those people, but sometimes I think people are not bothering to learn their devices. I know several people who have never bothered to even get any training, look at any guydes or even use the interactive voiceover tutorial they added a few years ago. They kept calling and asking questions. I eventually was like, if you don't experiment with your phone, or pay me for instruction I won't be giving anymore. It was a lot of questions. Lol! I also agree that I think dragging is part of the fun for this game. It's my favorite way to play. The dev is adding double tap to move a card, but I might continue to drag even after the update goes live. It just scratches a sensory itch I didn't know I had. I know some people are probably like, well she has more vision than me, but trust me, I don't. I am totally blind, with almost no light perception and I have been blind since birth. So that isn't it.
Now update coming
There is a new update coming that should address some of the bug we've been reporting. It will also add double tap to move a card. Thanks for trying out the game. It's in review by apple right now, so it will be released whenever they decide to release it.
Re: Dragging
Who knows? Admittedly some games have dragging support implemented better for us than others - for example the latest Outbrick version literally tells you how many cells you're dragging over and where they are - it's great.
I think t he problem is that, particularly for totally blind people like us, using the whole screen of a phone or an iPad is something we have to work at - but as far as efficiency and speed goes I've found it really rewarding. Takes me all the way back to the old days playing Kings Corner which was one of the first games that made that mechanic work with Voiceover, ☺️.
Re: Dragging
Yeah. I think it can be. I am also the type of person that experiments a lot. It's how I best learn, so when I got my first Iphone all the way back in middle school, it blew my mind. I eventually was able to help him get his foot in the door, the person I was teaching voluntarily, but it was so hard. I would explain things and it was like he didn't get it. Come to find out, he didn't understand the basic concept of a touch screen well. He was used to using a computer with lots of nested things that are under each other and he thought that's how a smart phone should be as well. So he didn't understand why it wasn't like that. He didn't understand that everything accessible to a person is usually on the screen and therefore you can usually always get to it with a touch. So of course he didn't understand scrolling either. Anyway, I eventually helped him, but as far as what I was saying earlier, I wasn't trying to insult anyone, but I just wish folks in general were more curious about the world around them. This does include myself. You don't know how many times I've been embarrassed because I've blundered into a situation without asking the right questions.
The update is out.
The update with the fixes is out. Double tapping to move works well, and there is more feedback on what card was swapped with what that way as well. There were more levels and other things added too. Give it a whirl!
The update works like a charm
The subject line says it all. Double tapping makes gameplay a lot easier, and I was able to coplete Level 1. I then decided to complete the daily puzzle, which proved difficult, but I was eventuallyable to complete it.
Update works, plus dragging thoughts!
I do think it's important that everyone try what they can. And I also don't think that it's always a matter of whether someone has tried. Learning is absolutely vital, no bones about it. But it's also alright to just not be good at something, to decide it's not worth your trouble, and to go about your day.
When the only way to edit your home screen on iOS was to drag, I tried--truly I did. But the process was painfully slow, and even when I was successful at it--which I wasn't, much of the time--it brought me no satisfaction. Eventually I just decided to reset my home screen layout whenever my organization needed a glowup, which puts my apps on single pages, all in alphabetical order. This works fine for me and has for the many years since I made this decision. And I don't have to endure the utter frustration of trying to get my finger to move in straight lines or make sure that things are exactly where they ought to be before I let go.
I don't say this to argue that there's no point in trying to drag, or that there's no point in learning new things. But I think it's very easy to assume that something boils down to someone not trying, when there can be a whole host of reasons why someone struggles with it. And even when someone *can* learn to do something, that doesn't necessarily mean they have to, or that the time and frustration involved will be worth it to them.
Besides this, dragging is no longer the only way to do things. In almost every instance where drag can be used across iOS, there are other methods of input, and this is for the most part true inside other apps as well. So while it's certainly a useful skill, I don't know that it's fair to say that it's vital, or that it's always a matter of learning or effort.
Mostly unrelated to that, the update is lovely, thanks so much for sharing the feedback! I'm off and sorting now and it's quite satisfying.
Re: Update works, plus dragging thoughts!
Thanks for giving the game another try. Also, I want to apologize for making you feel bad, if I did. I've enjoyed the little convo we've been having, so I hope I didn't offend you. Yeah. I really like this update. The extra feedback is nice. I think I enjoy games like these.
Oh no no, not offended at all!
I'm pretty difficult to offend, I just wanted to add my thoughts in general to the conversation about dragging and my experience with it. :) I've enjoyed our conversation as well and enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts! Very sorry if I came off rude or critical in any way, this definitely wasn't intended!