NEW LENSES: Experimental Capture and Release

The viral daily word game that took Twitter and the world by storm has only been live for around 6 months at this point but it has already gained enough popularity for it to have been bought by the New York Times for seven figures and popular enough for it to have spawned a large variety of clones and copy cats.

In case you haven’t heard of Wordle, it’s a word game that was developed by Josh Wardle all the way back in 2013 as a fun side project. He eventually revisited the project during the pandemic as a way to keep his wife entertained. The object of the game is to guess a random 5 letter word from the English language within 6 guesses. Within those guesses, letters would be highlighted green if they were in the correct spot for the answer word and highlighted yellow if they were within the answer word but were in an incorrect spot.

The game grew in popularity over its first months of being released to the public but it was when Wardle add the share feature to the site that it grew rapidly having 300,000 users play Wordle on Jan 2nd, 2022 and over 2 million play the game only a week later.

Wordle 282 5/6

⬛🟩⬛⬛⬛ This, along with the daily aspect, is Wordle’s secret sauce
⬛🟩🟩⬛⬛
⬛🟩🟩⬛🟩 The game itself isn’t actually original, it’s just an updated
⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩 version of the 1950’s game Lotto which was more recently
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 used in the game show Lingo

Okay so Wordle seems cool but what’s up with also those weird names you said at the beginning?

Around the time Wordle was sold to the New York Times a large number of rip-offs had already been around allowing users to play the game infinitely many times, but the wave of fun new versions was on the way.

The first one I saw was Tayordle, but soon after came

Squirdle (Pokemon)
Globle (Countries), Worldle (Also countries but different)
Dordle, Quordle, Octordle, Sedecordle (two, four, eight, and sixteen wordles at the same time)
Numberle (Just a 5 digit number)
Sweardle (just curse words)
Queerdle (LGBTQ+ vocabulary)
Poeltl (basketball players)
Heardle (songs)
Semantle (this one is just terrible)
BRDL (just banding codes of birds)
Gorldl (Hockey players with 5 letter last names)
Bardle (only 5 letter words Shakespear used)
Chessle (opening chess moves)
Flaggle (this one is nuts with flags)
Primel (5 digit prime numbers)
Star Worlde (guess wooki everytime)
Canuckle (canadian)
Lewdle (no)
Mathler (a math equation)
Nerdle (a math equation again)
Who Are Ya? (European football)
Wordle-BTS (the Army loves this one)
Framed (Movie screenshots)
Squabble (Worlde Battle Royale)
Citydle (you get it)
Wheredle (Geoguesser with clues)
Heardle (This one is Wordle but with Phonemic lettering)
Lordle of the Rings (The One True Wordle)
Airportle ( 3 letter airport codes)
Wizarding Wordle (Harry Potter Wordle)

The trend is so big it has started to parody itself with
Letterle(Just one letter)
Eldrow (the computer guesses your word)
Reverse Wordle (you can see the tiles and have to fill in the guesses)
Survivle (Avoid guessing the word for as long as possible but you have to keep the letters you get right)
Evil Wordle, Absurdle (trying to make you guess wrong for as long as possible)
Adverswordle (the same as Eldrow)
Obscurdle (you have to guess what the yellow and green tiles even mean)

Its gotten to the point where someone has created a website to track all of the Wordle clones. rdles.com

I mostly did this post to talk about all of the different Wordles but I think it’s interesting how creative people have gotten in themes and even different game mechanics while still trying to stick to the core mechanics that make rdle games unique. Some of these games have gotten surprisingly popular even if they are just more niche clones of the original. I think it”s mostly because of the things that made the original so successful.

1. The Knowledge Aspect (even with those that are pretty luck based, all of the games present themselves as games of skill even if the skill is unique to the game)
2. Daily Plays (only playing one game a day keeps them from getting repetetive, makes them feel like a part of a routine, and makes players excited to play again)
3. Spoiler Free sharing (I can brag to my friends on how well I did without ruining it, it can also remind them to play the game in a fun way that challenges them to better and is more interesting than “I got the wordle in 4 tries today””)