As a combination gamer/cinephile, I’m always on the lookout for new games that can test my movie knowledge. Luckily, Movie Grid, a new Wordle-style game, does that more intuitively and simply than any game I’ve played yet.
I’ve written about some of the movieWordlesI’ve discovered in the past. Though these games have different mechanics, they all follow the one-puzzle-per-day format which proliferated following the success of Wordle.Framedgives you a series of increasingly obvious stills from a mystery movie. Box Office Game gives you a random weekend from a random year and tasks you with guessing its five highest earners. Cine2Nerdle — bad name, good game — offers a 4x4 grid with movie-related people and terms, requiring you to move the tiles around until you form five movies. I like Cine2Nerdle, but at times it can run kind of slow on my phone, making it difficult to move the tiles into place. I’ve often had to close it and open it again multiple times in a row to get it running well, which isn’t ideal for a browser game.
That’s why I’ve been grateful for Movie Grid, which I’ve started playing in the past few weeks. The game, created by Sam Shulman and Alex Nunan, is similar to Cine2Nerdle, but with a better form factor. Instead of moving tiles around, you just need to guess the movie that belongs in each part of the grid. Let’s take yesterday’s puzzle as an example:
Denzel Washington, Ben Affleck, and Rachel McAdams mark the three rows, and Nominated for Best Picture, Begins With a Vowel (Ignore ‘the’), and Genre: Drama mark the three columns. At each spot on the grid, you need to find the overlap. So, an Oscar movie starring Denzel Washington, and a drama featuring Rachel McAdams, and (hardest of all) a Ben Affleck movie the title of which starts with a vowel. These variables change every day, so you might need to identify a movie that Tom Hanks starred in with Paul Newman, or dredge your brain for a Meryl Streep film that qualifies as a war movie.
As a movie trivia lover, this hits the sweet spot for me in a way that others haven’t. In Cine2Nerdle, you can fake it. You might get three in a row by accident, prompting a golden outline to show up which allows you to stumble on the answer. In Framed, if you hold on until the end, you’re likely to recognize an image through cultural osmosis, even if you don’t know the movie. But Movie Grid is that pure uncut film trivia. If you don’t know Denzel’s career, good luck coming up with a movie he’s starred in that started with a vowel. Or, you might be like me and remember that The Tragedy of Macbeth earned him an Oscar nom for Best Actor and mistake that memory for the movie getting a Best Picture nod. It can be tough.
It also is more specific to the kind of trivia I grew up obsessing over than a game like Box Office Game, with its focus on studios and grosses. As a middle schooler, I watched a ton of ReelzChannel on cable, DVRing and religiously consuming shows that covered director and actor filmographies. For better or worse, it formed the way I relate to movies now. It’s fun to have a game that rewards that — even if it is a slightly diseased way to think about art. Movie Grid does that perfectly. It’s the kind of game for movie obsessives who like their movie trivia neatly organized, all their docs in a row.
