Wordle: A puzzle enthusiastic about the net

When a new online game comes out today, it often works like this: You download an app and register with an email address, then you spend a lot of time designing your avatar and choosing between countless hairstyles, face shapes and clothes, and if so If you then wander through the virtual world later, real money is due: for keys, treasure chests or superpowers.

The puzzle game Wordle, which is currently thrilling hundreds of thousands online, is not like that. On the contrary: it is through a website freely accessible to everyone from anywhere in the world, the look is minimalist, there is no advertising.

The rules of the game are simple: Wordle is a mixture of Scrabble and Mastermind, the pegging game from the 1970s, in which a predetermined sequence of colors had to be determined. Wordle requires guessing a five-letter English term. You have six attempts for this. If a letter does not appear in the word you are looking for, it is highlighted in gray. If it appears in it, but is in the wrong place, the box lights up yellow. When a letter is in the right place, it appears green.

Twitter gave Wordle its breakthrough

The game was designed in the grassroots style by Josh Wardle, a software developer from New York. Originally intended for his mystery-loving wife, it went online in mid-October. In November, Wordle had just 90 players a day, at the beginning of January there were already 300,000 and last weekend 2 million, like the Guardian reports.

The game became particularly popular after Wardle added a function that players can use to share their respective results on Twitter. After all, if you have the chance to show off a bit on the Internet, you rarely let it slip by. Around the turn of the year, more and more graphics with green, yellow and gray boxes appeared on Twitter.

These graphics are informative and mysterious at the same time: Wordle connoisseurs know immediately how many attempts each person needed to get the correct result; however, the tried words remain hidden. For all excluded, the graphics are just one thing: confused piles of colorful boxes.

Vowels and common consonants

What is the best way to find the result? With the elimination process and a bit of luck. The right strategy is already being discussed on Twitter. It’s best to start with a term that includes many vowels and common consonants, such as house, slate or tribe. We do not recommend words in which a letter occurs more than once, as this is not displayed on Wordle. Also not very useful: rare letters like X or Z. You can also search for words let help.

Last but not least, Wordle has another advantage: there is only one puzzle per day. That means slowing down, and knowing that all players around the world are looking for the same term also has something in common. Having to wait for something is almost like today weirdBut friends of the daily crossword puzzle in the newspaper may still remember this strange rhythm. Weird. Incidentally, it also has five letters.