Storyboard

A song's lines, shuffled. Put them back in the right order. Four tries, and a new song every day.

How Storyboard works

You get the lines of one song, shuffled, and four tries to put them back in the order they were written. After each try, every line that is already in the right place turns green. Lines that are not stay as they are, and you are not told where they should go.

The song is not named until you finish. Naming it would give away most of the puzzle, because knowing the song usually means knowing what happens in what order.

How to solve one without knowing the song

That is the intended way to play, and it works. Verse rhymes, so a line ending in a sound you have already seen usually belongs two lines away from it. Grammar carries: a line starting with "And" or "But" rarely goes first, and a line that finishes a sentence has to follow the one that starts it. Sense carries too, because most of these songs tell a small story in order: somebody goes somewhere, then something happens, then it ends.

How a puzzle is checked before it is scheduled

A shuffled song is only a puzzle if it can be put back. The generator refuses more drafts than it accepts, and the rules it refuses on came from reading what it produced rather than from theory.

A song with two identical lines is thrown out, because there is no way for a player to know which of them goes where, and no way for the scoring to award them the credit either. A stanza whose lines were joined by a dash in the source is thrown out too: stripping the dash produced "Lord, give me faith he hears what grace is this" out of two half lines that were never one sentence. Verses that open mid sentence, that carry a stray digit from a footnote marker, or that end on an unbalanced quotation mark are all refused on the same principle, which is that a line a player cannot read as English is not a line they can order.

What survives is scored for whether it rhymes in a recognisable pattern, because rhyme is most of what makes an unfamiliar song solvable. Verses that do are preferred, which is why so many of these read like nursery rhymes: they are the ones the check keeps.

Why the same song does not come back next week

The schedule enforces a gap of sixty days before any song can repeat, and it prefers songs that have not been used at all. That is a real constraint rather than a nicety, because the supply is finite: the pool is small enough that without the gap you would see the same handful in rotation inside a fortnight and the puzzle would become recall rather than reasoning.

It also weights the mix. Traditional and secular songs are drawn more often than hymns, so the first stretch of the schedule is entirely secular and the balance only shifts slowly after that. The hymns are in the pool because the public domain has a lot of them and comparatively few of anything else, not because the game is about hymns.

Where the songs come from

All of them are in the public domain, and every one is checked against a published source before it is scheduled. Most are traditional nursery songs collected in 1895, with a few hymns and folk songs that are older still. The source for each is recorded and shown when you finish.

Public domain is a real constraint rather than a preference. Song lyrics are separately copyrighted, and a licence for modern words would make this game something that can be switched off by somebody else. That is what happened to Heardle, and it is not a risk worth taking on a daily puzzle people are asked to come back to.

The cost is stated plainly: the songs are old, and a lot of them are ones you half remember from childhood rather than anything on the radio. It also means the supply is limited, so the archive grows slowly.

Play the main Musicianle board, try Fill The Grid, or read how the main game works.