A new doddle online puzzle game is taking over the world, and you surely may have noticed numerous posts on social media containing strange green, grey and yellow squares.
Well, this is Wordle, and it is the hippest thing in casual entertainment today.
Wordle is a daily word-guessing game, providing its own twist on such word-guessing classics as Hangman and Scrabble. The goal is to use a structure, somewhat similar to that of the classic game Mastermind, to guess a five-letter word.
The rules are actually very simple: to find the right word, you have six guesses. For example, you start your first try with the word Hopes, the game will tell you if any letters are accurate. If any of the letters are green after submitting a guess, that indicates they are the correct letter in the correct place.
If the squares are yellow, that means you have the correct letter but in the incorrect spot. And if they are grey, they're not in the day's word. There are no semantic clues in Wordle, which makes it even more fun.
The ability to connect with others can be seen as a big part of the game's success. Everyone who participates gets the same chance and the same word, which they can try to guess only once every day. Luckily for those who still have not guessed the word on their own today, successful players can share their results on social media, boasting about their accomplishments without giving the puzzle away.
As a game whose success is largely due to the fact that users share their results on social media, Twitter has been swept away in recent days by a tsunami of related memes, in particular by those that declare they are not really from Wordle at all.
Many of us can certainly relate to some of these memes, and as it turns out, many situations from our ordinary life can be expressed with colored squares.
But the amount of sort-of-pixel art from literally everyone pushing the trending topic of squares and the growing popularity of the game on Twitter manages to greatly exceed expectations.
The Phenomenon of the Daily Word Puzzle
Earlier this month, The New York Times reported on the story behind the trendy time-killer.
The game was developed by a single man, British national Josh Wardle (a wordplay, indeed) to amuse his partner, as they both loved playing with words. In October last year, Wardle eventually decided to share his simplistic game with the world, with about 90 people playing it in November. And then it took off rapidly.
The creator believes the quick rise of the game is due to several factors. It is all about the unpretentious rules, word limit per day, and the ability to share the result on social media, which turned a simple puzzle into a real competition.
“I think people kind of appreciate that there’s this thing online that’s just fun,” Wardle explained. “It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs. It’s just a game that’s fun.”
Users around the world have rushed to create their own language editions of the game, and now the game is available in languages such as Russian, Spanish, French, Chinese, and even Latin.