If you think about it, the letter L is just another I lying in front of the letter I. What's a T? Maybe it's two L's turned upside down and then welded together" The V is just a tilted I welded at the bottom with another tilted I, and the X is . . would be two I's crossed or two V's, one upside down and welded at the pointy end. Perhaps?

This is the concept behind the puzzle game Word Factory. You have a small factory that can produce the letter I, and you have to make words like OX, CAT, and IVY using only that letter, eventually resulting in difficult configurations like DOCTOR, VOXEL, and AXOLOTL.

How to do it with just I is to run a production line of I's from one factory to the next; there are factories that will bend I's into C's, which is of course how you make C's, but if you want to make O's there are no O factories. It gets more complicated from there.

Hey, it turns out there were I's in TEAM all along. In fact, there were a lot of them! Coach was completely wrong.

Half the fun of word factory is simply experimenting. You often don't know what a particular factory does until you run the letters through it, and in the process you may discover a different recipe for the letters than you intended. The first time I tried to make an X, I sent two horizontal Is to a welding shop and instead of crossing over the X, I got the = sign. This was not only interesting, but quite accurate. An equal sign is, after all, one I lying on top of another I.

And while it would seem that once you learn the recipes for the 26 possible letters, the fun is gone, Word Factori has additional challenges, limiting the number and variety of each factory that can be used at each level. Some letters have more than one recipe, so you must discover the optimal factory setup to win each challenge. It can get a little hectic at times as factories, conveyor belts and letters fly across the screen.

Finally, one of the odd little details I enjoy is that when you successfully complete a word, it spits out a picture of the word, rather than the word itself. In other words, if you spell the word duck, the screen gradually fills up with a picture of a duck, not the word duck. Strange, but cute! But cute...Word Factori will be released in August, but there is a free demo on Steam so you can (should) try it out now...you know how to spell Steam, right?