Wordle’s worth: More letters for score-setters

The gameplay is simple: guess a five-letter word in six attempts. The tile turns green for every letter guessed right in the right position. It turns yellow if you’ve guessed the right letter but in the wrong position. A grey tile means you’ve guessed wrong. But what makes Wordle stand out is that you get to solve a puzzle just once in 24 hours and don’t need anything but a web browser to do so—making it both unique and accessible.

The game has amassed a community of fans, who love that it is an uncomplicated, shareable pastime that combats pandemic alienation. In an interview with The Guardian on January 12, Wardle says, “I get emails from people who say things like ‘Hey, we can’t see our parents due to Covid at the moment but we share our Wordle results each day’. During this weird situation, it’s a way for people to connect in a low effort, low friction way.”

As with most things undergoing a meteoric rise, first came the memes, then the tributes and spin-offs. Now, you can even make your own customised version on mywordle.me, by choosing a word of your choice as the word of the day. Here’s are some of the oddest alternates designed to fill the hours before the original game posts its next puzzle of the day.

Absurdle: Adversarial Wordle, is kind of like Wordle’s evil twin. There’s no fixed word for you to guess but an infinite number of guesses and roughly 2,315 possible answers. This forces you to narrow down your options until you find just one possible word left. It’s unfair, harder than you’d expect, and tests your patience as much as your vocabulary. So obviously it’s as loved as it is hated. This isn’t the only adversarial game created by science fiction author Sam Hughes, who goes by the name qntm. He has also created a tiresome version of Tetris called Hatetris (which gives you the worst possible pieces in every turn). Both the free games can be played on his website qntm.org.

Queerdle: The LGBTQ-friendly clone of Wordle, created by Jordan Bouvier, wants you to rummage through all the queer-culture related words you’ve encountered to find the word of the day. The words may be four to eight characters, could be two words put together and is more often than not NSFW. Words like Dragking and Twunk (someone who is both a Twink or a slender gay man and a hunk) have found their way into the list of correct answers. But that’s not all, getting the word wrong can evoke quips like “Sorry my dear, sashay away” and the score-sharing emojis aren’t regular yellow and green boxes but snakes, bananas and coconuts. The game is free to play on queerdle.com.

Sweardle: It makes you guess one four-lettered swear word a day in four attempts. And obviously, it’s rarely the one we’re all thinking of. Freelance writer Stuart Houghton made a list of all the profanities and slang terms he could think of to create this cheeky yet fun game. Guessing the word correctly means being reminded that ‘your mother will be very proud of you’. Give it try on sweardle.com.

Primel: The Wordle-style game but those who prefer digits to letters. The gameplay is the same, but here, you guess a five-digit prime number instead of a word. Created by ecological statistician, David Lawrence Miller, Primel gives you six tries before you give up and wish you paid more attention in math class. Play it for free on the website converged.yt/primel/

Letterle: Perhaps the silliest of all the parodies of Wordle. This is one in which you guess a single letter of the day, in 26 tries. The game could most likely end in the first try, or in the 26th attempt, depending on your luck. There are also no tricks to finding the winning letter quickly and no scope of getting better or worse at the game. According to data journalist and game creator Ed Jefferson, Letterle was created for Wordle-lovers who find whole words exhausting. Head to edjefferson.com to give this free game a try.