+1, but one thing about So Clover is that not really any game in it. It's more of an activity. A very engaging activity, and one that has worked with every group I've tried it on, gamers and non-gamers alike, and my current #1 choice if I was asked to bring some games to some non-gaming social event.
What I mean by there not being a game to it is that there's no winning or losing, or even evaluating success. Everyone gives their best clues (by some metric; sometimes people optimize for fun rather than clarity), you solve the boards and get a score, but the score is totally meaningless. It can't even be compared across sessions.
It turns out to be quite hard to add a game into it. I thought about the problem for a year before deciding that there was no viable way to do it within the constraints of the physical game, and it'd need to be online. For the last few weeks I've been working on an async online word-game inspired by So Clover, where one of the tihngs I wanted to do was to add an actual game (as a competitive mode), and so far the feedback from my playtesters has been that they're not interested in any of those plans, and just want to use it as a chill word game sandbox and share puzzle links over WhatsApp. (The site isn't ready for public consumption, but if anyone here wants to try the game out with some friends, hit me up with an email and I'll send you a link. Contact details in HN profile.)
What I mean by there not being a game to it is that there's no winning or losing, or even evaluating success. Everyone gives their best clues (by some metric; sometimes people optimize for fun rather than clarity), you solve the boards and get a score, but the score is totally meaningless. It can't even be compared across sessions.
It turns out to be quite hard to add a game into it. I thought about the problem for a year before deciding that there was no viable way to do it within the constraints of the physical game, and it'd need to be online. For the last few weeks I've been working on an async online word-game inspired by So Clover, where one of the tihngs I wanted to do was to add an actual game (as a competitive mode), and so far the feedback from my playtesters has been that they're not interested in any of those plans, and just want to use it as a chill word game sandbox and share puzzle links over WhatsApp. (The site isn't ready for public consumption, but if anyone here wants to try the game out with some friends, hit me up with an email and I'll send you a link. Contact details in HN profile.)