As a kid, Collin Waldoch played lots of games, and as a graduate of UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce, he and two friends founded a company called Water Cooler Trivia
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providing customized games for companies. Now he’s offering a new challenge. It’s called Twofer Goofer, and it involves clues that lead to a rhyming pair of words.
A tough and durable fabric containing harmful toxins: denim venom. Excessive praise given to a place where energy is converted to electricity: battery flattery. Yellow-fleshed fruits performing a postured dance was mango tango. The family of trees most in need of a cash infusion – poorest forest."
If you’re stumped, Waldoch offers assistance.
"You could get the first letters of each word. You could get the number of syllables in each word," he explains.
Guess the right answer, and you’re rewarded with a goofy picture generated by an artificial intelligence program.
"There’s a custom piece of art each day that sort of celebrates you solving the puzzle that can show a really goofy thing like a guppy puppy, a bicycle icycle – that kind of thing."
His former classmate, Arthur Wu, and friend Sam Sweeney handle the technical end of things, while Waldoch cooks up the clues.
"Really they’ve invaded and infested my brain at this point. Pretty much wherever I am in the world I’m looking around, thinking, ‘Oh what rhymes with that?’ It’s a daily puzzle game, which means every day at midnight eastern time a new puzzle goes live."
They started playing back in August – sharing clues with about fifty family members and friends. Today, thousands are playing twofer goofer.
"Over 10,000 different folks have solved coming up on 100,000 puzzles," Waldoch says.
So do the guys make much money on the game?
“We don’t," he chuckles. "It’s just for fun.”
He says the expense is modest.
“It’s about $100 a month, so we’re splitting the losses three ways.”
And they have no plans to monetize it, but – in a nod to the New York Times which launched the wildly popular Wordle – Waldoch would not object to a call from any other newspaper interested in a quirky word game.
