A bunch of my friends have a routine of playing a whole host of wordle variants daily. It's been amazing to watch.
dordle/quordle/octordle: Play 2, 4, or 8 boards at once. I find quordle to be the sweet spot.
xordle: Just one board but two secret words. A more puzzley feel. I made this one.
squardle: Sort of a crossword of wordles doing 6 at a time. Your feedback has some spatial meaning rather than all the puzzles and hints being done in parallel.
semantle: Guess the word based on similarity of meanings rather than spelling.
worldle: Guess the country/territory by its shape.
chessle: Chess opening moves.
ordsnille: Swedish wordle. I don't know Swedish but I do this one, using 5 letter words I find on the page then guessing plausible words. I'm slowly building up a valid word list by playing.
So I think even if the NYT acquisition is distasteful to you, maybe Wordle still is an example of nice things we can have.
I think it is so cool how the popularity of Wordle has opened the door to so many games that expand on the concept. It is like it created a shared expectation for how games like this can work that has now been adapted and expanded by so many different creators. I don't think any of the variants would be as popular without the original being as culturally prevalent as it is.
If you want to try one more I made squareword (https://squareword.org) which features a 5x5 grid of letters, featuring five words down and five across. Like a combination of sudoku and Wordle.
One small feedback on squareword: it'd be very nice to do some word pruning a la Wordle to exclude rarer words that the average person is unlikely to know (or have any exposure to), like today's first row, 4th column, and 5th column. IMO brute-forcing words until you get a word you've never even seen before isn't very fun.
There are a bunch of lists out there for these variants. I wrote a small one as a weekend project to learn React and AWS. People seem to like it since I've only shared it on my personal FB and it's getting hundreds of hits a day. I'll plug it here since you seem like an "rdle" lover.
want to add one more? I've been making a clone that isn't different from the base experience but focuses on challenging friends instead of the once a day thing.
sedecordle (https://www.sedecordle.com/) - 16 at once. I think I'd like this if I could open it on a big screen and see all the words side by side, but as it is there's too much scrolling. I agree that quordle's the sweet spot.
I'm amazed not a single comment here has talked about these Reddit projects: Place and The Button were insanely notable when they happened. I am blown away to learn the same guy was behind them.
I assumed Wordle was somewhat of a one-hit wonder, but it sounds like Josh has a knack for making some pretty popular online phenomena.
It’s incredible to me that one person has had such a large impact on internet pop culture. I wonder how many distinct individuals have been regular users of his games.
I think it is a one-hit wonder. Obviously the button and place were popular games, but they were instantly shown to a billion people when launched. They could have launched tic-tac-toe and it would have been popular.
I don't think that's true. It's difficult to convey the amount of overnight culture that came from
"the button". It wasn't a game for many people, it was an absolute obsession for months to hundreds of thousands of people.
It's very easy to discount if you weren't there, fair enough.
Thank you for bringing this up; I think a lot of programmers might look at Wordless, see a seven-figure payout, and beat themselves up for not managing to do the same when their experience level is vastly different.
Yeah, there's a ton of barely noticeable nuance to Wordle's design that makes it so popular. The way sharing was set up was brilliant, and the "everyone gets the same word" design feels super limiting and strange, but you can instantly see the tie back to his earlier projects where that makes it more of an experience/event than a simple word game. Things like Place and The Button having hard set interaction limits changes what they are and how people play them.
The usability experience is absolutely top notch as well, I can't speak to any input or interaction method that feels natural that Wordle doesn't seem to handle effortlessly.
It's a simple game, but it's a game tuned to the absolute perfection of it's craft.
The thing that makes Wordle successful to me is the fact it allows and encourages actual social interaction, not the fake "social" of having to hear what every yahoo has to say about something. I don't post mine on Facebook or Twitter but my friends do and it's nice to have a small fun thing to chat about. I talk to my wife about it once we're both done. We need more of these kinds of things that are social without being "social".
It's fun because it became a viral literally everybody I know started doing.
I'm a bit burned out now after doing all of the variants every day and trying to be overly competitive squareword, quardle, octordle, sedecordle, worldle, heardle.. there's too many now
It was certainly very iconic in the Netherlands (coincidentally I just gave a lecture about it this week, based on [1]), but it has aired in a number of other countries as well, such as the US and France. I think the former even is the original [2].
Shouldn't be too strange that people might want to play a game themself instead of watch other people play a game they never knew of on TV in Dutch.
There are probably a lot of good games out there that could be thoughtfully ported so that people can play. But you'll find that a naive clone by itself doesn't guarantee success.
Game concepts generally can't be copyrighted, in the US at least.
From Wikipedia [1]:
> gameplay elements of a video game are generally ineligible for copyright
> It’s still unclear what went down legally between the NYT and the Wordle Archive, but a spokesperson for the news outlet vaguely told Ars Technica that the archive’s “usage was unauthorized, and we were in touch with them.”
They;re still trackers and there's no reason to think that data collected for "analytics" isn't also used for "advertising", or for "selling to the highest bidder if we get desperate enough for money".
Wordle may or may not be proof but there are plenty of nice things on the internet. Tons of personal blogs, tutorials written by experts for fun, etc. It might be true that on average, random articles are horrible, especially on mobile where every 4/5ths of a screen a new animated ad appears (I just leave the site). But, for there's still plenty of sites made with TLC
Readit News
dordle/quordle/octordle: Play 2, 4, or 8 boards at once. I find quordle to be the sweet spot.
xordle: Just one board but two secret words. A more puzzley feel. I made this one.
squardle: Sort of a crossword of wordles doing 6 at a time. Your feedback has some spatial meaning rather than all the puzzles and hints being done in parallel.
semantle: Guess the word based on similarity of meanings rather than spelling.
worldle: Guess the country/territory by its shape.
chessle: Chess opening moves.
ordsnille: Swedish wordle. I don't know Swedish but I do this one, using 5 letter words I find on the page then guessing plausible words. I'm slowly building up a valid word list by playing.
So I think even if the NYT acquisition is distasteful to you, maybe Wordle still is an example of nice things we can have.
If you want to try one more I made squareword (https://squareword.org) which features a 5x5 grid of letters, featuring five words down and five across. Like a combination of sudoku and Wordle.
https://www.rdles.com
https://www.yordzzle.com
sedecordle (https://www.sedecordle.com/) - 16 at once. I think I'd like this if I could open it on a big screen and see all the words side by side, but as it is there's too much scrolling. I agree that quordle's the sweet spot.
squareword (https://squareword.org/) - form a five-by-five word square
nerdle (https://nerdlegame.com/) - a numerical equation instead of words
No affiliation.
A favourite of mine is heardle (https://www.heardle.app/): Guess the song based on the first seconds.
unlimited wordles plus friend challenges
I assumed Wordle was somewhat of a one-hit wonder, but it sounds like Josh has a knack for making some pretty popular online phenomena.
It's very easy to discount if you weren't there, fair enough.
The usability experience is absolutely top notch as well, I can't speak to any input or interaction method that feels natural that Wordle doesn't seem to handle effortlessly.
It's a simple game, but it's a game tuned to the absolute perfection of it's craft.
Dead Comment
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I'm a bit burned out now after doing all of the variants every day and trying to be overly competitive squareword, quardle, octordle, sedecordle, worldle, heardle.. there's too many now
[1] https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(American_game_show)
There are probably a lot of good games out there that could be thoughtfully ported so that people can play. But you'll find that a naive clone by itself doesn't guarantee success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hqq3VjrcFc
I guess this means, everybody can build games like this and the NYT would not be able to say they infringed on a game concept they own?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jotto
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> It’s still unclear what went down legally between the NYT and the Wordle Archive, but a spokesperson for the news outlet vaguely told Ars Technica that the archive’s “usage was unauthorized, and we were in touch with them.”
I don't see any ads while playing it.
It loads a lot of scripts from what seem to be advertising related domains though:
Are they already making money from this or what are all these external scripts about?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXzfvYoFQFo
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