What is making this new online word game trend? It's so old school & without any of the mandatories game developers today use as hooks, yet its trending!
Wordle has by now become a fairly trending topic. Twitter itself not only has #wordle trending almost every day but also the word count for the day trending too #wordle121 #wordle122 & so on.
Created by Josh Wordle a couple of year back, but dusted into shape during the lockdown, in this word game you get 6 chances to guess a 5 letter word.
How do you begin? Plain guesswork as there are no clues on what the word for the day is! You get 6 guesses, so you begin with looking at 30 world tiles in 6 rows. As you type your guess, the word tile let's you know if you are right or not in 3 colours. Green to indicate the right letter & in the right place in the word, yellow to indicate the letter is in the word but not at the place you right now and grey indicates letter is not in the word! The keyboard also shares the same, so a nice way to know which letters you can pick to make the word.
The possibilities of you getting it right go from 1 (if you guess right at the first go) to 12.2 million (if you get at least one letter as yellow or green in the first word) to 24million (if you do not get any letter right)! Yes, these are the mathematical possibilities!
There is a lot of curiosity around Wordle simply because it beats all commonsensical thinking. In today’s age of fast, now and endless, Wordle is blissfully old school.
There is only one word a day for you to play and guess. You get your next try at midnight when the next day officially begins.
You cannot play or replay the earlier games.
It’s on a website page – no app!
Seeing the ‘chatter’ around it, got me thinking what has made it tick? Some of it come from my interaction with this game, which I have been playing for almost 2 weeks now on a daily basis
The chance aspect – Humans, by nature do enjoy taking a gamble, or as we say in India ‘Tukka marofy’. No clues means you take a guess, a real wild guess!
Gets you thinking, simple yet challenging.
The wait for a day – makes it engaging surprisingly! (It has now become the first thing I do on my mobile with my morning cup of tea, WhatsApp only after I have Wordle-ed!)
You can share your score socially, but when shared from the app, it just shows your grid as a set of colour blocks. No spoilers unless you post our score with the word or take a screenshot of your guess for the day!
The cumulative score – your daily score whether its 1/6 or 5/6 or even 6/6 gets added. (This feature does not work that well on an iPhone / Safari OS, as I unfortunately learnt).
Josh Wordle has remained immune to demands for an app or more words per day. How long before he caves in I wonder!
Your thoughts?
If you are playing everyday, what makes you comeback? Do share in comments below.
If you haven’t played until now, you can start now https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/