Not sure how this would be implemented yet, but for a game played on a social media site it would be cooler if there was a semi-cooperative element to play, so that players are also rooting for others to be successful.

Yeah, I agree. That's where the hints idea came from. If one person guesses a word, the resultant hint helps everyone. But this is a very simple concept, so there's plenty of room to do this better.

Also, I suspect it will be a bit aggravating to play a wordsearch on a webpage without some UI support (maybe a custom frontend, or some kind of support built into Steemit itself).

I agree with this, too. I was also thinking of implementing it as a browser extension, but that would have totally killed any cooperation that might have happened. Thinking about it now, as a future enhancement, I suppose it might be possible to read the post into a browser extension and provide UI support that way.

I think the idea of social-enabled games on the chain is a good one.

I think this is key, regardless of whether it's this particular game.

It seems ironic to me, if Steem is going to really grow, it has to happen at the social/attention layer (IMO), but so many of our developers want to focus on the blockchain layer. An experienced developer or two from FB or Twitter could have a huge impact here. SteemMonsters was a start, but it was too much of a standalone product. With its transactions all buried in custom_json, it was sort-of a free rider. I think the ideal game needs to plug into the social media more directly.