Quartile is the new word game from Apple News+. It started life in June 2024. It is simple, beautiful, and challenging. The game asks one to build as many words from the tiles, represented as tiles in a 5 x 4 grid (5 rows and 4 columns). The idea is to form words with 1 to 4 tiles. There are higher rewards when one forms longer words and uses more of the tiles. When at least 4 quartiles are found, one earn bonus points.
Hiding in the tiles
The tiles or parts or segments or whatever you choose to call them is fundamental for word formation in this game. The tiles in the game can be of 1-, 2-, or 3- or even 4- letters long (aka n-grams). Often the tiles are cut randomly and may not give a clue for how one can form the words. Take for example, rd as a tile. By itself the tile seems random with two far away consonants. The good news is that one can find this tile in words like lord, word, bird, curd, turd, thunderbird, etc. Often one may find tiles with a vowel at the start or end of the tiles. This makes it a bit easy to find the connections.
Connecting the tiles
At the end of the day, the word formation is eased if one can find connection points between tiles. Let us take a look at the word quartile itself. It can be split up into 4 parts in one of the following ways:
- qu ar ti le
- qua rt i le
- qu a rt ile
- qu art i le
Each split can enable several other words to form in combination with new tiles. For example art + i + st = artist or qu + eu + ed = queued and so on.
So how many words are possible
The Quartile game comes with 20 tiles. This leads to 1000s of new words to be formed. The game does not allow repetition of the same tiles within the words formed. That is a minor limit to reduce word possibilities. So how many possible combinations are possible?
- Combinations with 1 tiles = 20 … yes, each tiles can possibly form a word too. Rarely do they make it that easy.
- Combinations with 2 tiles = 2019 = 380* … yes, each position has choices and the c choices are independent.
- Combinations with 3 tiles = 201918 = 6840 … yes, each position has choices and the c choices are independent.
- Combinations with 4 tiles = 20191817 = 116280* … wow! there are 100K+ combinations.
Not all combinations will form the words. Only some of these form valid words in the dictionary. Not all combinations maybe in teh quartiles’ word list for the day which further restricts the words. To some degree, there may be words not in dictionary that may be allowed as well.
Earning Points
Points are allocated based on the number of tiles used to form words. Points is exponential with the number of tiles, incentivising the users to try harder.
- Words of 1-tile earns 1 point
- Words of 2-tiles earns 2 points
- Words of 3-tiles earns 4 points
- Words of 4-tiles earns 8 points
Furthermore, there is a bonus of 40-points allocated when a user finds all the 5 long words using 4-tiles aka quartiles.
Users climb up the rank in the leaderboard based on points earned starting at 0 points for Novice and earning Expert rank when they cross past 100 points.
Enjoy forming words
A new set of tiles are released every day. Wake up and give the brain a wake up call too. Form the words; Form the connections; Beat the forgetfulness! Enjoy!
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