Six attempts to find the correct five-letter 'word of the day'! The challenge thrown in by Wordle has taken the internet by storm - as ABC News puts it - becoming the perfect pandemic game in 2022.
Wordle is a vocabulary-based puzzle game, where the end objective is to find the 'Word of the Day.' It was also the first viral game of 2022 with millions of people daily sharing their scores.
The popularity of the game was such that several others, eyeing a share of Wordle's success, created imitation apps and put them up on the app store, prompting Apple Inc to remove the copycats.
The creator of Wordle, Brooklyn, US-based software engineer Josh Wardle, hit upon the idea to create the guessing game to kill time with his partner Palak Shah - who loves word games - during the pandemic.
Besides being a "time-pass", Wordle also helps in building the English vocabulary of the user, Wardle told Newsweek in an interview.
Innate tendency to crack puzzles
Designed initially for just two of them - Wardle and his partner - to play, Wordle became an obsession when shared to the creator's family WhatsApp group. Realising the potential of the game, and the interest it could generate, Wardle approached a public website with a proposal.
The game's growth was incredibly fast. Once opened to the public, it initially had 90 gamers, which rapidly swelled to more than 20 lakh within months. The innate tendency in humans to solve puzzles and to showcase their intelligence to others might have fuelled the game's growth.
Wardle, however, feels two other aspects, too, have contributed to the Wordle's popularity: it's free, and only a little time needs to be spent to play. The puzzle could be solved within five minutes of logging in, and the answers could be discussed with friends.
What's Wordle?
Wordle is a wordplay on Josh Wardle's surname. A simple equation made the game viral: a puzzle a day. The correct five-letter word - "the word of the day" - should be found in six tries.
"It only catches you," Susan Drabin, a daily player, told AFP. Wordle could be described as a cross between the board game Mastermind and the daily Crossword puzzles in newspapers.
The challenge is to find the correct word from five random letters. The player will be presented with five empty boxes, and they have to guess the five-letter word of the day. However, no hints are provided.
Once the letters are keyed in, the boxes turn colours, either green, yellow or grey, prompting the players to type in another combination of letters. The colours are the only hints.
If the box turns green after a letter has been keyed in, it indicates that the player has got the correct letter at the right place. Yellow denotes the letter is in the word, but not in the position where it was typed in. Grey indicates the wrong letter, meaning, it is not in the word.
Cool little pattern makes it big
The growth of Wordle was phenomenal. On November 2, 2021, 90 people played the game. Millions joined in January, making it a viral game. Players are now sharing their results on social media like Twitter.
"It creates a kind of cool little pattern that the game makes it really easy to share on social media...so you can show people how well you did on the word of the day. And I think that's one of the big things that has made this game take off," Gizmodo's executive director Andrew Couts told ABC News.
How good is Wardle at Wordle?
Despite creating the game, Wardle said he lacked the expertise to win over his partner. While Shah could solve the puzzle in three tries, he requires four to five attempts, dispelling the notion that it would be a child's game for the creator.
Questions, however, have been raised over how long could Wordle keep the players interested since Wardle's database has merely 2,500 words.
