Scramble: when the board lies to you
In Scramble every mark wears a disguise. The rule has not changed, but the picture you are looking at is deliberately trying to throw you off.
What changes
On a colour board, the squares are cut into odd shapes. On a shape board, the shapes are painted in odd colours. In both cases only one thing is real: the colour on a colour board, the shape on a shape board. The other thing is a decoy. It looks like information and carries none.
Every decoy is always different from the real mark. Nothing on a Scramble board is accidentally honest.
The science behind the headache
The effect is related to a classic finding in psychology. In 1935 John Ridley Stroop showed that people are slower to name the ink colour of a word when the word itself spells a different colour, for example the word "green" printed in red ink. Reading is so automatic that it interferes with naming the colour. Scramble does the same trick to a puzzle. Your eyes lock onto the shape, because shape is a strong signal, and your brain has to talk them out of it.
How to cope
- Choose a channel and stay on it. Decide that you are reading colour, and read only colour. If you catch yourself noticing a shape, look past it.
- Squint, or look slightly beside the board. It sounds silly, but blurring your focus a little makes strong shapes less distracting while colours stay clear.
- Solve the easy squares first. Fill in what you can by logic, then check your work by reading colours only.
- Check each row out loud, in your head. "Red, green, yellow, blue" reads colours; "square, circle, triangle" would read the decoys.
Where you will meet it
Scramble is a late idea in Quiltoku. It first appears at Level 361, on bosses and the previews that lead up to them, on boards up to 8×8. On colour boards of 9×9 and larger the squares are too small to show a decoy shape, so the game leaves the decoy out there. A few Saturday and Sunday dailies use it as well. Each time, the first time you see it, there is a short explainer. There is nothing hidden in the rules, only in the picture.