On the Tip

You know this word. You've used it. You've read it. You'd recognize it instantly if someone said it out loud. But right now, asked to produce it, your brain has quietly folded its arms and refused. That feeling — the word hovering just out of reach, so close you can almost taste its first letter — is called the tip-of-the-tongue state. Every other word game asks whether you KNOW something. On the Tip is built entirely around the far more maddening question of whether you can RETRIEVE it. HOW IT WORKS You get a category and an oblique little riddle. Not a dictionary definition — those you could just look up, and looking it up ruins the whole thing. Something more like a nudge. The answer sits in front of you as letter tiles, wrapped in fog. Each new cue thins the fog a little. The first letter. Then a piece of the word's history. Then the way it sounds. Somewhere in there, it lands.…