81 ms·

Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

456 points by vaghetti 5y ago

somedude895 5y ago
It's also interesting in how modest and personal it is. There are no global scoreboards, so there's no "anonymous competitiveness." Nobody cares about your scores except your personal relationships, which allows it to not care about exploits.
parentheses 5y ago
Author does hit the mark pointing out its elegance. The game's word-size of 5 limits binging. I went back to play some of the first few words and found that I got sick of the game very quickly. It'd be interesting to hear the creator of Wordle explain their decisions.
okonomiyaki3000 5y ago
I may be completely wrong but, after playing 3 or 4 times, I got the feeling that this game is very easy and involves more luck than skill or strategy. It looks and feels like a puzzle so you get the feeling of having solved something but have you, really? If you find the word in 3 tries 90% of the time, does it mean you're actually better at the game than someone who usually needs 4 or 5 attempts? Or are you just a little luckier?
- lgas 5y ago
  Over a small sample size it's impossible to say, but if you maintain those numbers after many games then yes, you are better. And there are a lot of opportunities for skill or strategy. For example the choice of your first word matters a lot, should you plane something like ADIEU to get most of the vowels, or should you plane something like CRANE that has a lot of the popular consonants? And then the biggest mistake I see people make is getting a lot of the letters in the right spot early and then just leaving them there on subsequent guesses. Instead you should be thinking about what types of words can be made with the letters you know about and then what types of whole new words that don't contain any of the letters that you know are correct will give you the most information about the letters you don't know... ideally your first few guesses should contain none of the same letters in order to to maximize the information you gain from each guess.
  - throw3434053 5y ago
    >And then the biggest mistake I see people make is getting a lot of the letters in the right spot early and then just leaving them there on subsequent guesses You may be watching people play hard mode.
  - overlordalex 5y ago
    > And then the biggest mistake Some might say the biggest mistake is not playing on hard mode ;) > Hard Mode > Any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses I prefer hardmode as it prevents the sort of elimination strategies, and it feels more like a strategic game. However it does come back to bite you if you get 4 letters early on for a combination that has a lot of possible answers.
  - samhw 5y ago
    > And then the biggest mistake I see people make is getting a lot of the letters in the right spot early and then just leaving them there on subsequent guesses. I just heard about this game for the first time from this thread, went to play it, and realised this on row #3 after initially wasting row #2. It made me want to go off and write an algorithm (I actually returned to the thread to see if anyone had written anything along those lines). But I just realised this won't do, because your score depends not only on the last row but on the intervening ones too, so there's a perverse incentive to repeat the successful letters. That works nicely for non-programmers, but it made me think I'd prefer a purer game where the only 'cost function' is based on the correctness of your final guess. Or at least, that game would be quite fascinating to try and write an optimal algorithm for.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  There is a strategy, but I found it ridiculously easy to pick up. At first I was just guessing randomly and sometimes including double-letter words etc. Now I consistently get it in 3-4 guesses but my actual score seems to depend on luck. It feels like I've solved the puzzle and now just going through the motions doing it again and again. A bit like speed solving a Rubik's cube once you've figured out an algorithm maybe.
  - kuboble 5y ago
    Rubik's cube speed-solver and wordle enthusiast here. Wordle solving is considerably more demanding. It's more like trying to solve a cube in fewest moves. If I would have to compare mindlessness of speed cubing to a word-based activity it would be speed-typing.
  - cookie_monsta 5y ago
    Cool. Now you should try hard mode :)
- scambier 5y ago
  I'd say it's 50% luck and 50% strategy. I have written my own clone, and my colleagues play it everyday and share their result. I can tell that some people are consistently _really_ good at it and never lost a single game, while some are average at best. Of course, if you pick the right word in 3 tries or less, it's mostly luck. But beyond that, you have to plan a little bit ahead, recognize there are more possibilities than available lines, and act accordingly. That's when the game becomes interesting, and gives a little bit of dopamine. Finding the word in <= 3 tries is nice if you want to brag a bit, but not really satisfying. It's when you finally find it at your 5th or 6th try that it's pleasing.
teekert 5y ago
It's nice how things get "pretty damn smart" if you don't optimize for trackable eyeballs on ads.
nnoitra 5y ago
Yet another flappy bird kind of a thing that caught on. It seems pretty boring to me and I don't wonder at all why I didn't have this idea first. It's pretty much a crossword variation.
- wesleywt 5y ago
  Salty is a five letter word.
  - nnoitra 5y ago
    I mean I see it the same way as 2048. I don't think it's anything super-interesting and it's just something that has caught on.
qq66 5y ago
A lot of these are just observations about what you can do with a product when you're not trying to make money from it.
EGreg 5y ago
Am I the only one who doesn’t really get interested in Wordle even after all these explanations?
smuggle 5y ago
For those who want to ruin the fun, I threw together some javascript that gives you suggestions as you play. Link [1]. There are chrome extensions that probably do this better, but I had fun making this. [1] https://gist.github.com/coertg/e8d0fc66c3a56a3c3490c77b7f8122d0 https://gist.github.com/coertg/e8d0fc66c3a56a3c3490c77b7f812...
code_duck 5y ago
It’s extremely obvious that the person who made wordle killed it. What an admirable success.
wedgeantilles 5y ago
Thank you for mansplaining Wordle.
IgorPartola 5y ago
What has been driving me a little nuts about it is the amount of luck involved with getting the word in a few tries. I can reliably get the word in 4 tries give or take. But when you hit something equivalent to *AR you can guess BAR, CAR, PAR, MAR, TAR, JAR, FAR, etc. The number of times I got 4 out of 5 letters on the second try just to finally get the word on the 5th or 6th try feels like I am cheated of a victory.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Pretty inevitable, though; there are some letter groups in english that make that unavoidable. I use this (the second table). https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfrequencies.html https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfr... I memorised STARE/TASER, UNLID, CHOMP (all the letters with more than 3% incidence, in a word order with a good letter distribution close enough to the statistical one, and some useful letter groups) and the remaining significant ones(GBFYWKV) and work with that. If I get a green from the first word I assemble a new word from the letters of the other two; this strategy has seen me guess it in two or three a bit more often. This may be obvious but in your scenario where there are lots of permutations, it's worth considering that you can solve words two ways -- first by thinking of a word that fits the shape available, and second by carefully thinking of the words with the highest frequency unused letters in all available slots (if there are two or three remaining letters, a guess that is likely to provide you two yellows is vastly better than a guess that will provide you one green). If you use a three word opening gambit (which you can't do in 'hard' mode) then you'll regularly guess it in four or five, anyway. I strongly suspect that four is the most common number of guesses for good players.
  - cookie_monsta 5y ago
    I keep in mind that OTHER NAILS contains the most common letters, but I play in hard mode and don't use either of those as a start word. My second guesses onwards are made up of clues shown and letters from those two words. I don't understand the fun in playing easy mode and laying down words just to eliminate letters. I see a lot of people saying that it guarantees them a win in 4 moves, but once I adopted the above strategy I regularly started getting 2s and 3s. Four for me seems just ok, no big deal. At five I start making excuses/blaming the injustices of the game. ... and today I got a 5, so I will be signing the NYT petition, plus my elbow hurts /s
wolframhempel 5y ago
Not directly related to the article, but I was just wondering what the best word to start wordle with is - and I think it is ATONE. I arrived there by looking at the most frequent letters in english from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency and putting them into an anagram solver at https://www.thewordfinder.com/anagram-solver/ https://www.thewordfinder.com/anagram-solver/ There is no five letter word from ETAOI (the five most frequent letters) but there are some from ETAOIN (the top six), namely atone, eatin, entia, oaten, tenia and tinea. Wordle doesn't recognize most of these, but it does recognize atone
- shrx 5y ago
  You can improve this guess by calculating the letter frequency for the 5-letter words only. With the dictionary that I use, the optimal word to start with is AROSE.
- CamelCaseName 5y ago
  Recently I watched two videos on how to solve Wordle using information theory by ThreeBlues1Brown https://youtu.be/v68zYyaEmEA https://youtu.be/v68zYyaEmEA https://youtu.be/fRed0Xmc2Wg https://youtu.be/fRed0Xmc2Wg
- dubbel 5y ago
  ATONE is a good one based on letter frequency - I wonder if letter position might lead you to another word, for example one that ends with "ed", "er" or "es". Or has an "e" as the second to last character? Edit: I just read in a comment, plural or past tense words seem to be less common in the Wordle word set, so my example wouldn't make as much sense.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    I use STARE or TASER. Then UNLID and CHOMP :-)
- RegBarclay 5y ago
  I try to use words that hit the Wheel of Fortune RSTLNE letters - BEAST, RUSTY, ROAST. It's served me pretty well. I haven't had to go beyond the 5th guess yet and commonly solve it in 4.
deleted 5y ago
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toss1 5y ago
>>Some people say the biggest difference between an engineer and a senior engineer is not on the code they write, but on the senior engineer ability to figure out ways to not write code. YES!! The thing I spent the most time on when coding was to avoid writing code. * All code takes longer to run than the no-op * The greatest performance/speed gains are not from optimizing, but from entirely eliminating chunks of code. * All code is habitat for bugs, the more habitat, the more... * More code can unnecessarily obfuscate the structure of the app, and ability to reason about it Some time later, the same principle came up in a seemingly very different field of sportscar racing, when my driving coach asked me "What are the things you do that slow the car down?". I thought of some mistakes I was making, but he pointed me to the big basics - "turning and braking", followed by discussion that the most basic thing to do was to avoid turning and braking. Now obviously, some of both will be needed as soon as you approach the end of the starting straight — the point is to do only the absolute minimum, and that often takes a LOT of work to figure out how to NOT do something. Same applies for writing code - avoid it at all costs, and write only the absolutely required minimum. It is effort well spent
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Nice insights. A few good design decisions multiply together to make Wordle irresistible to both gamers and non-gamers.
cdubzzz 5y ago
I'm a huge fan of the plain text share functionality that Wordle uses (introduced?). Loving it in the various clones that are coming out as well and I hope it becomes a common "simple share" approach in other applications.
- valtism 5y ago
  The share functionality was actually taken from a twitter user who started posting her results in that format. It's a very clever way to show your journey without spoiling the results, and almost certainly had a big impact on the virality of the game.
- afavour 5y ago
  One of my favourite features of Wordle is that the share functionality uses the Web Share API. It’s been available cross platform for a while now but this is the first truly huge use I’ve seen and I think a lot of the games success is because of it.
  - cdubzzz 5y ago
    Oh, cool! I did not realize that. Will have to take a closer look at it…
sam1r 5y ago
I agree with OP. Not enough credit goes to how simple, but great of a product Wordle is.
jcims 5y ago
I think it’s about as close to a local maxima as any software product I’ve ever used.
- mcenedella 5y ago
  Exactly!!
mcenedella 5y ago
The OP does a terrific job detailing the simple beauty of Wordle. Is it OK if we like it more because it was born out of love?: ‘Wordle is a love story’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-game-creator.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-ga... And in the space of a month went from ‘introduced in NY Times’ to ‘bought by NY Times’? ‘The New York Times Buys Wordle’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/business/media/new-york-times-wordle.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/business/media/new-york-t... In many ways, I think this is the perfected ideal of what engineer-creators hope for. The intense focus on making something that feels magical for one - even better that that one is magical to you. Sharing the creation with a few friends and having them experience the magic too. And having the world recognize, and then pay $ millions, for your creation done in the name of love. No years lost in the lab, no fighting with corporate suits to keep ads out, no long marches of ‘growth’ tactics that feel icky. It is the Romantic Ideal of Engineering. Does any other story come close?
- kyawzazaw 5y ago
  Maybe this - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/25/summly-sold-yahoo-teenage-creator https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/25/summly-so...
  - chairmanwow1 5y ago
    Summly was an amazing thing
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Stardew Valley doesn‘t have nearly as short of a timeframe but is another labor of love success.
  - marricks 5y ago
    I think it's an even better personal success than Wordle, or at least different. It was a man's labor of love for years, which tied together all his interests: music, art, programming, games. And better yet he built a career out of doing all of those things and still owns and maintains it years later. Presumably still loves it too.
egypturnash 5y ago
> It also brings players back into the game, but not in an annoying way like Farmville Facebook notifications. As someone who doesn't play, it's getting more and more annoying. Especially now that there's stuff like Wordle Except It's Four Games At Once demanding space on my social timelines.
- alanbernstein 5y ago
  Sounds like it's actually the social timelines that annoy you.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    Couldn’t FB notifications be blocked before? Which is similar then to saying social timeline vs the game. Not the same, I agree.
    - modeless 5y ago
      You can easily block Wordle scores on Twitter at least. Just add Wordle to your blocked words.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Well yes but that is a whole other rant. It’s been right under the threshold of “annoying enough to remember how to mute a phrase in Twitter’s web client” for a while.
- harry-wood 5y ago
  Yeah "not in an annoying way" is certainly debatable. Personally I'm not annoyed by it, but I can see why people would be. Whoever made this spoiler bot seemed pretty annoyed by it :-) https://twitter.com/dancow/status/1485660308622528513 https://twitter.com/dancow/status/1485660308622528513
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  We have a "game" channel in our friend discord channel (like 10 or so if us). All interesting content has been completely drowned out with wordle shares, and there's no end in sight. I'm glad people are having fun, but I would like that channel back.
codeflo 5y ago
Good design is often subtle and easy to dismiss, especially for smart engineers. You might remember the "What's the deal? It's just mastermind with letters" comments here and elsewhere. I agree with the article that Wordle got many little things right, and I think that's a huge part of its success. I wonder how long it will stay that way under NY Times ownership. Just today, I was greeted with a new cookie prompt that covered up the keyboard on mobile Safari and wouldn't disappear without a refresh. Not a good sign of things to come.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  It's coming one step at a time. First the subtle side bar linking to their other games. They diverged from the answer list. Next they removed all bad words from the dictionary like "bitch" and so on. Now the cookie stuff.
prewett 5y ago
One of the subtle ways he didn't mention is that the words seem to use medium-frequency letters, so they aren't an obvious guess, but it isn't some word with no vowels or a bunch of z's, either. I did notice that after the NYT took over the words now seem to have fewer letters, so it's more necessary to logic out which word it is if you want a good score. Previously I could figure out what most of the letters were with three words, but now I have to work at it. At least until I can come up with well-chosen words for the new regime.
- mango7283 5y ago
  To be clear, even if the NYT never took over, those words would still have come up, the nyt only removed 6 words, which is a very small amount. Didn't stop people from saying the NYT gentrified the game after tacit came up though, which is it's own commentary on facts and fact finding and confirmation bias
- AutumnCurtain 5y ago
  The day "jazzy" is chosen is the day Wordle makes some enemies
moskie 5y ago
I've also begun to thing of Wordle as a meme. I know virtually anything could be framed as a meme, but there's specific aspects of Wordle and its rise in popularity that make it a particularly apt description. Its viral spread was fast and resonant. It's super easy to consume. Think pieces dissecting it end up in mainstream publications. The story about its origin gets mythologized. And, most importantly: unending riffs on the base meme. There's basically infinite Wordle clones with slightly (or very) different rules. And the shared results themselves can be riffed on as well. It's done a thing that's usually reserved for image memes: it's created a whole new language that people are using to make fun(ny) things. It's just really interesting to see that happen with a game.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Flappy bird? Temple run?
  - moskie 5y ago
    Yup, totally right. Don't have much experience with Temple Run and its clones, but Flappy Bird fits the bill. The fact that there's only a couple games that come to mind reinforces the novelty of it happening again with Wordle though.
    - EZ-Cheeze 5y ago
      I got a high score of 165 on the original Flappy Bird (Samsung Note 3)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zanecodes 5y ago
  Another cool instance of this was 2048, when it first came out. I was in college at the time, and for at least a month you could see a half dozen or more games of 2048 on the screens of any given classroom's laptops.
TeaVMFan 5y ago
Having implemented my own 5-letter word game, I can agree that much finesse lies under the covers. Wordii is for the impatient, letting you play more often if you choose: https://frequal.com/wordii/ https://frequal.com/wordii/ The many subtleties of this genre make it a great programming challenge. I encourage developers to try making their own version. I think you'll come away with a healthy respect for Mr. Wardle.
- Rayhem 5y ago
  I just played and failed, only to get "Sorry, the word was GIBBY" with a link to the "definition" of GIBBY[1] on dictionary.com. Spoiler alert: according to dictionary.com, GIBBY isn't a word. [1]: https://www.dictionary.com/misspelling?term=GIBBY https://www.dictionary.com/misspelling?term=GIBBY
  - TeaVMFan 5y ago
    I have removed it, thank you.
- phenylene 5y ago
  Nice work! Dark mode?
  - TeaVMFan 5y ago
    That will be a fun addition. Especially since Wordii is designed for longer play, that makes sense. Expect to see it soon. Thanks!
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  I have a reasonable vocabulary but I just got the word “copra”. I did get it on the sixth try but only after guessing cobra and realizing there were no letters left that produced words I knew. According to Wikipedia “Copra is the dried coconut kernels of which coconut oil is expelled.” It might be a blind spot in my vocabulary but I haven’t had this happen with wordle. The accessible word list could be considered another genius element of its design.
nemo44x 5y ago
Fun game but becomes fairly automatic when you know the best words to start with.
- ghaff 5y ago
  There are probably a dozen or two starting words that are probably good choices depending on your strategy but not sure I'd call it automatic at that point.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- function_seven 5y ago
  So don't start with those words. Or, force yourself each day to start with one you haven't used yet. That's what I do. I now forget what the "optimal" word is (STARE? AISLE?), but my first guess usually has something like a B or F in it. While it's not optimal generally, it is satisfying when you get the word in 2 or 3 guesses because you lucked into the right initial guess.
- AndresNavarro 5y ago
  But once you get pretty good at it you can choose to start with a suboptimal word, like a handicap.
- mecha_ghidorah 5y ago
  I pick a different start word each day to help keep it fresh I have a friend who always users yesterdays word as their first guess
  - jbmny 5y ago
    That feels like yet another aspect of Wordle's appeal to me: the fact that it starts with a "clean slate", where you can enter any word you want. It's an opportunity for creativity, spontaneity, and serendipity. One of my favorite parts of the game is pulling that first word out of the air.
dvirsky 5y ago
The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involved in making you play one game per day, no server side calls are involved in gameplay at all. And yes, this means that changing your time zone will let you play tomorrow's game, and that you can just view source to know tomorrow's word - it appears right after today's word in the code. This is so counter to how we usually design software in so many ways, it's just delightful.
- the_af 5y ago
  I think the full list of words being hardcoded and readily available is not a kind of elegant simplicity, but simply an inelegant compromise to get everything done client-side, which has obvious benefits. It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation.
  - neoberg 5y ago
    Why tho? Cheating just takes away from the cheater's experience and doesn't affect anyone else. It's pretty much like any physical game. You can play (or cheat) it any way you like even though the game is designed to be played in a certain way.
    - the_af 5y ago
      I agree with your philosophy against cheating, but still, games must implement some sort of anticheat, just like they must implement some sort of game rules. Imagine not implementing blocking walls in Counter Strike, "just don't walk through walls, it would make the game less fun and why would you ruin the experience for yourself like that?". This is a case where not hiding the word list was done because it was easier to implement Wordle this way. Engineering-wise, it's not elegant, it's a cop-out.
ghaff 5y ago
I actually think the OP and the comments are too focused on the programmer-related aspects of this. I'll add a few things. 1. It's not trivial but it's not that hard if you have a decent vocabulary and some intuitive sense for word frequencies (and word pair frequencies) for different locations in a word. The answer list does not seem to include really hard words as naively picking all the words in the MW dictionary would be. It's a fun 10-15 minute puzzle. 2. Five letter seems like something of a sweet spot. 3. The answer word list does not appear to have a lot of plurals or common vowel endings for past tense, etc. Or obscure words. 4. It lends itself to what I'll casual cheating, i.e. there are easy ways to get some hints without giving the answers away while focusing on a strategy. 5. Basically, it's got good gameplay for a casual game. It would be easy to build something along similar lines that didn't have as fun gameplay for a casual gamer.
- friendzis 5y ago
  > 3. The answer word list does not appear to have a lot of plurals or common vowel endings for past tense, etc. Or obscure words. I guess it depends on one's vocabulary, but for non-native speaker it sure does have some obscure words and more importantly technical terms. For example TRUSS. While not exactly an "obscure" word, unless one has familiarity with technical construction terminology non-native speaker most probably is not familiar with such a word. It is just not a word one would expect to appear in a fiction book, film or casual conversation.
- jasonpeacock 5y ago
  #1 is why it's so successful. It's just challenging enough to make you think, but still solvable by most people. So we all get that nice dopamine rush of solving a puzzle with a reasonable perceived effort. How many people don't play the NYT Sunday Crossword b/c they never get more than a few words? There is a very devoted fan base for crossword, but it's not as universal as Wordl's adoption. To me, that's the genius - just hard enough, but not too hard. It's not a Scrabble competition, it's a fun diversion and shared challenge to experience with your friends.
  - moritonal 5y ago
senectus1 5y ago
the only design flaw i see is that the color blind mode colors are not intuitive choices. I'm not color blind but I play with some friends who are, I have to switch color pallets to share results. in color blind mode its light blue for right letter wrong spot and orange for right letter right spot. mentally, to me this is the wrong war around.. and it drives me nuts and forces mistakes on my end.
benrapscallion 5y ago
An important aspect isn’t mentioned: the words are five letter words that even my six year old kid can attempt.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  Also us secondary people (the majority) whose English is not native. My first thinking when I tried wordle was that for sure it's a word that I don't know...but all the words in the main list are known by us as well.
  - mango7283 5y ago
    None of them that I've seen are those crazy Scrabble words no one uses, which is a really really great thing about wordles curation.
richardatlarge 5y ago
Did you know… that if you use a letter multiple times but it’s used fewer than that, the extra letters are grayed out - this surprised me but it’s correct to do it
jrochkind1 5y ago
I'm surprised how infrequently I see anyone commenting on the wordle tile-flipping animation. It's... really nice? I like to watch it. I suspect I'm not alone, and if the tiles simply changed color in an instant without animation, wordle would not be as successful.
- lanewinfield 5y ago
  Agreed. And the feeling of suspense and subsequent satisfaction when they slowly flip all to green is a dopamine hit in and of itself.
- taeric 5y ago
  My favorite thing in this is that it is easily recreated with about fifteen lines of css. Truly a very well crafted animation that fully builds on the joy of seeing the reveal. Edit: realized my point seems reductionist. I meant that to be that it is not just a technical marvel. The artistic choices that went into building it are truly impressive.
- Forricide 5y ago
  Josh Wardle, creator of Wordle, was interviewed on the Syntax podcast and they discussed exactly this. I'd paraphrase the segment (it was a really interesting bit on design philosophy) but I don't remember it quite well enough so I'd probably butcher it. But, suffice it to say the creator agrees.
- romellem 5y ago
  The creator added this specifically to add some “juice,” a phrase from the talk [Juice It or Lose It][1], where they describe it as meaning: > A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do, tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input. He talked about this as the end of a [podcast][2] he was recently the guest on, Syntax [1]: https://youtu.be/Fy0aCDmgnxg https://youtu.be/Fy0aCDmgnxg [2]: https://syntax.fm/show/430/creator-of-wordle-josh-wardle https://syntax.fm/show/430/creator-of-wordle-josh-wardle
- mrtksn 5y ago
  It's called "juice it or lose it" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
wanderer_ 5y ago
Great thread up in here.... I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said.
- wanderer_ 5y ago
  I seem to have violated the community guidelines. Apologies...
14 5y ago
I manage to get the word on my last try and it was very satisfying. I've never seen this game before. I was a little sad you only get one word a day.
- aklemm 5y ago
  So fun to see someone start the journey. Enjoy.
d--b 5y ago
You can’t explain its success by product greatness only. I mean sure wordle is fine. But the no-ad and once-a-day features are what the new york times has been doing for years (and yes it works really well). There are probably _thousands_ of other mini games that are no-ad and once-a-day. The sharing part is pretty cool. It does encourage bragging and probably played a big role in its virality. But yet again, there must be plenty of other games that do that well (and we’ll likely see an awful lot more of them). Again I do think that wordle is pretty good, but its success is more easily explained by lucky timing and reaching some big influencers early rather than amazingly smart design. The reason I am posting this is that I think people shouldn’t think that if they build something as good they will have the same success. And I find it a bit dishonest to say “oh of course it had some success, it’s so great” after the fact.
- scaramanga 5y ago
  Thanks. It's hard to say this without feeling like you're taking away people's moment of being happy about a rare example when someone got lucky who we feel really deserved it. But I think you're quite right, we can't take it as proof that good things succeed or that bad things must fail. And it doesn't hurt to be gently reminded of that reality, especially in these moments.
- Kiro 5y ago
  I think it's more than luck. Wordle was made by the same guy that created r/place and The Button so he clearly knows how to make viral things.
  - d--b 5y ago
    Well, this also means that he already has a certain visibility, which definitely helps kickstart virality.
    - Kiro 5y ago
      Or he just has a knack for creating viral things.
sedatk 5y ago
I'd mentioned how Wordle clones failed to copy its success because they didn't understand what made it unique before, the article does a decent job too: https://twitter.com/esesci/status/1481734261434507268 https://twitter.com/esesci/status/1481734261434507268
- ehsankia 5y ago
  I don't think it's entirely true. Many have managed to create alternatives that have gotten serious traction. There's a few I've been consistently playing for a week and honestly enjoying more than Wordle itself. I've been playing Quordle, and sometimes it's more insane alternatives [1] [2]. I've also really been enjoying Semantle [3], it's probably one of my favorite and most unique ones. There's other ones that are also need but maybe too much, like Squabble [4] and Squardle [5], but I wouldn't say they've all failed. Also, to say "the game itself is mediocre at best" seems ridiculous. A mediocre game doesn't get popular purely based on once a day and sharing... [0] https://quordle.com/ https://quordle.com/ [1] https://octordle.com/ https://octordle.com/ [2] https://sedecordle.com/ https://sedecordle.com/ [3] https://semantle.novalis.org/ https://semantle.novalis.org/ [4] https://squabble.me/ https://squabble.me/ [5] https://fubargames.se/squardle/ https://fubargames.se/squardle/
  - sedatk 5y ago
    Mastermind and alike have existed in many different forms over decades. None of them became as popular as Wordle, not even close. It's been mediocre and outdated for a long time. But, Wordle has features that makes it unique, welcoming, and viral. The alternatives you quote aren't even close. That doesn't mean none of them can catch up with Wordle. I was saying that most of them was getting it wrong (like removing daily word limits, making the game harder, more convoluted, asking for signup, adding ads, etc). Nope. That's not going to work.
    - ehsankia 5y ago
      The ones I named all keep the daily limit and don't have ads/signup. I don't think they're overly hard or convoluted either.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordle https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordle mechanics are nearly identical to the 1955 pen-and-paper game Jotto and the US television game show Lingo He had created a similar prototype in 2013, the prototype allowed for endless play, with players able to play puzzles immediately after each other, and its wordlist was unfiltered. In mid-October 2021, he made it public after it "rapidly became an obsession" with relatives The game became a viral phenomenon on Twitter in late December 2021, after Wardle added a sharing element to the game, letting users copy their results in the form of a grid of colored square emoji. The feature was inspired by a group of friends from New Zealand
croes 5y ago
Mastermind with words. It's success reminds me of Flappy Bird. It's a mass phenomenon not a great game.
zgs 5y ago
Wordle is a spam engine. The game isn't that difficult -- it's been solved by several folks and it can always be won. The "share" button is the spam engine. If you play to enjoy it and don't press "share", well done. If you press "share", be ready to burn in the level of hell reserved for spammers. Fortunately, the NYT will screw this up and try to monetise it which will destroy its popularity in a short time.
shp0ngle 5y ago
> No ads, no log-in No ads, no log-in so far
syntaxing 5y ago
I think it’s also worth noting that the creator of Wordle was also the creator or Reddit place. His ideas are pretty novel and interesting
robbiep 5y ago
Effectively there are 2 wordles at the moment - the my times link has a different word and I was using the old uk link and so my partner and I are having different words. Pretty funny/an opportunity to do the ‘crossword’ twice a day! (For however long they keep it up!)
- TylerE 5y ago
  It (the old version at least), is pure client-side... just download a copy and never worry about it going away.
  - robbiep 5y ago
    ooh interesting - thanks! running from the same seed do you think, or a list that will iterate in a consistent manner across other users?
    - mango7283 5y ago
      It's a hardcoded list, the NYT removed some words but didn't change the rest, so "old wordle" is just a few words behind "NYT wordle"
      - robbiep 5y ago
        Ahh thanks! Unfortunately I upgraded to a new phone last night and have now lost it…
neltnerb 5y ago
I don't know if this is relevant, but it's been driving me nuts. Wordle is a game that was on the speak and spell in like 1990. It had a different name. It taught me how to spell a lot of words, and especially about patterns of where letters are found. It was actually my favorite game on the toy at the time, so maybe that says something about it just being a fairly fun game whether you get one word or not... I totally support turning this into an educational game for elementary school kids though, that really seems like how it's a smart game. It teaches you not just spelling but how letters combine, it's amazing. edit: Let them get addicted to spelling instead of, I dunno, youtube. For adults maybe one a day totally makes sense. For kids? Let them go wild.
GCA10 5y ago
One more factor in Wordle's popularity that I haven't yet seen commentators identify much. The game's word roster tilts heavily toward words with neutral or cheerful connotations. So your brain conjures up something happy at the end. You don't slog through the puzzle solving to end up with VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE or other such morose words. Instead, we get the likes of AWAKE, BLUSH, FOCAL, etc. That helps make the game a mood-stabilizer or even brightener. We're usually clever enough to find a solution most days. When we're slow and need all six turns, we get a cheery "Whew!" to console us. It's a simple, barely noticeable bit of gamification at its nicest.
- deckard1 5y ago
  Valentine's Day was CYNIC, which I did find humorous.
- alskdjflaskjdhf 5y ago
  >One more factor in Wordle's popularity that I haven't yet seen commentators identify much. The game's word roster tilts heavily toward words with neutral or cheerful connotations. >So your brain conjures up something happy at the end. You don't slog through the puzzle solving to end up with VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE or other such morose words. Ironically, SLAVE was actually one of the future solution words in Wordle pre-acquisition. The NYT removed it from the planned solutions. https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/15/22934587/wordle-solutions-changed-new-york-times https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/15/22934587/wordle-solutions...
  - danachow 5y ago
    They removed it from the master dictionary as well.
    - megapolitics 5y ago
      That may have been accidental. The array used to store valid guesses did not contain any of the words from the result array. Both are checked when you make a guess to determine whether it’s a valid guess. Removing a word from the result array also removes it as a valid guess unless it’s added to the other array. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt considering they also removed “inoffensive” words like “Agora” and say their removal as valid guesses was unintentional.
o_____________o 5y ago
I've been enjoying worLdle: https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/ https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/
- ep103 5y ago
  quordle is where its at
dionidium 5y ago
In addition to everything else already discussed — the game is really well done, the sharing feature is inspired, the animations are delightful, etc — the thing about Wordle that makes it so universally popular is that it’s a very easy game that is experientially difficult. You have 6 guesses of 5 letters. There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet. Anyone in the top few deciles of verbal ability should hardly ever lose (if ever, really; I’ve played about 50 times and never “lost”). People further down in verbal ability will still win quite often. And yet…it actually does engage your brain quite a bit! Despite being ultimately very easy, which people find rewarding, the experience feels challenging. This is an odd combo. I’m having trouble thinking of any other games with this property. It’s more like a word search than a crossword puzzle. It takes work to complete a word search, but everybody has the tools to do it.
- suzzer99 5y ago
  I've lost when I got into a situation with three green letters, no yellow letters, and a ton of valid words remaining with the other 2 slots. Can happen with one open slot too.
  - qq66 5y ago
    In that situation you don't keep guessing at the word... you enumerate the possibilities and guess a word that you know is wrong but will cut down your search space.
    - Narishma 5y ago
      Doesn't work in hard mode.
  - shawabawa3 5y ago
    Unless you're playing on hard mode you can do a known wrong guess to eliminate more potential letters
gpvos 5y ago
Sharing a Wordle result is the first application of coloured emojis that has been useful to me. Laughing or crying faces and hearts are nice, but don't really offer much over text emoticons like :-), <3 and such. But this method of sharing was not possible before coloured boxes were available as characters.
Biganon 5y ago
My friends and I love Wordle. I made a Discord bot that picks a random French word every day at 8 AM and 8 PM, and we guess it in the chat. I added a rule so that you can't make two guesses in a row, in other words players must take turns making guesses, so one person cannot just brute force the game immediately. We don't limit ourselves to 5 letter words, and it's really fun when the word is very long. Sometimes it takes a long time to find the word! A weird issue is finding a list of words that contains every valid French word. It's harder than I thought. I'm not talking about the target words here, but the valid ones that you can use to guess. I thought the 300,000 word list I had found would be good enough, but some pretty basic words such as "Parabolique" are missing. The correct solution would probably be to use a dictionary file instead, instead of a plain list, but I'm not sure there's a python library to parse dictionary files, say the ones from libreoffice. Also a fun bug was that since I use two completely different lists for the target words and the valid words (the target words list is a list of pretty common French words, it contains ten times fewer words than the valid words list, and it comes from another Internet source), there were words in the target word list but not the valid word list. Due to the order of the checks I do, the target word was deemed incorrect! My friends were certain they had found the correct word, the clues only allowed for one word, but it was rejected again and again. Now I've made sure the target word list is strictly a subset of the bigger list.
- scambier 5y ago
  For you words list, you can look here: http://www.3zsoftware.com/fr/listes.php http://www.3zsoftware.com/fr/listes.php
- jgtrosh 5y ago
  That's a good idea! Of course, there's no easy way to share it with other people, since it has to be on a shared medium. For anyone else looking for a >5 letter French worldle, check out SUTOM [1]; it took me a while to try it out but the long words are a nice change and the motus sounds are delightful. Please look again into libreoffice dic files, they're plain ASCII with a number of entries in the first line and you can probably s#/.*## the end of the lines (or maybe expand to include the alternate endings, as you wish). [1]: https://sutom.nocle.fr/ https://sutom.nocle.fr/
blobbers 5y ago
That bit at the end about Senior Engineers seemed a little bit of a stretch.
thom 5y ago
If we’re honest, is Wordle not popular because it’s a trivially easy game just obfuscated enough to convince us we’ve done something clever each day? It’s only slightly more taxing than rolling a d6 and tweeting the result.
jdrc 5y ago
> but not in an annoying way like Farmville Facebook notifications. Shared Wordle games actively improve your experience by adding a social factor. It's no different than any other social games. It's still novel, so people don't call it annoying ... yet I like the idea of sharing everywhere with a picture or emojis, because it means the game has no archive or hall of fame, which means users are incentivized to store it in their social media, which made it more viral. IT's a clever way to escape the limitations of social media platforms. But OTOH without archive or some long-term goal most people will find it pointless and give up soon. The article seems to imply that wordle is the first game that did all those things. That's not true, each of those elements has been done before, but this game does contain a combination of them.
- shawabawa3 5y ago
  It is different because it doesn't link to anything, doesn't have a call to action, no "free gems!" etc

456 points by vaghetti 5y ago

It's also interesting in how modest and personal it is. There are no global scoreboards, so there's no "anonymous competitiveness." Nobody cares about your scores except your personal relationships, which allows it to not care about exploits.

parentheses 5y ago

Author does hit the mark pointing out its elegance. The game's word-size of 5 limits binging. I went back to play some of the first few words and found that I got sick of the game very quickly. It'd be interesting to hear the creator of Wordle explain their decisions.

okonomiyaki3000 5y ago

I may be completely wrong but, after playing 3 or 4 times, I got the feeling that this game is very easy and involves more luck than skill or strategy. It looks and feels like a puzzle so you get the feeling of having solved something but have you, really? If you find the word in 3 tries 90% of the time, does it mean you're actually better at the game than someone who usually needs 4 or 5 attempts? Or are you just a little luckier?

lgas 5y ago
Over a small sample size it's impossible to say, but if you maintain those numbers after many games then yes, you are better. And there are a lot of opportunities for skill or strategy. For example the choice of your first word matters a lot, should you plane something like ADIEU to get most of the vowels, or should you plane something like CRANE that has a lot of the popular consonants? And then the biggest mistake I see people make is getting a lot of the letters in the right spot early and then just leaving them there on subsequent guesses. Instead you should be thinking about what types of words can be made with the letters you know about and then what types of whole new words that don't contain any of the letters that you know are correct will give you the most information about the letters you don't know... ideally your first few guesses should contain none of the same letters in order to to maximize the information you gain from each guess.
- throw3434053 5y ago
  >And then the biggest mistake I see people make is getting a lot of the letters in the right spot early and then just leaving them there on subsequent guesses You may be watching people play hard mode.
- overlordalex 5y ago
  > And then the biggest mistake Some might say the biggest mistake is not playing on hard mode ;) > Hard Mode > Any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses I prefer hardmode as it prevents the sort of elimination strategies, and it feels more like a strategic game. However it does come back to bite you if you get 4 letters early on for a combination that has a lot of possible answers.
- samhw 5y ago
  > And then the biggest mistake I see people make is getting a lot of the letters in the right spot early and then just leaving them there on subsequent guesses. I just heard about this game for the first time from this thread, went to play it, and realised this on row #3 after initially wasting row #2. It made me want to go off and write an algorithm (I actually returned to the thread to see if anyone had written anything along those lines). But I just realised this won't do, because your score depends not only on the last row but on the intervening ones too, so there's a perverse incentive to repeat the successful letters. That works nicely for non-programmers, but it made me think I'd prefer a purer game where the only 'cost function' is based on the correctness of your final guess. Or at least, that game would be quite fascinating to try and write an optimal algorithm for.
globular-toast 5y ago
There is a strategy, but I found it ridiculously easy to pick up. At first I was just guessing randomly and sometimes including double-letter words etc. Now I consistently get it in 3-4 guesses but my actual score seems to depend on luck. It feels like I've solved the puzzle and now just going through the motions doing it again and again. A bit like speed solving a Rubik's cube once you've figured out an algorithm maybe.
- kuboble 5y ago
  Rubik's cube speed-solver and wordle enthusiast here. Wordle solving is considerably more demanding. It's more like trying to solve a cube in fewest moves. If I would have to compare mindlessness of speed cubing to a word-based activity it would be speed-typing.
- cookie_monsta 5y ago
  Cool. Now you should try hard mode :)
scambier 5y ago
I'd say it's 50% luck and 50% strategy. I have written my own clone, and my colleagues play it everyday and share their result. I can tell that some people are consistently _really_ good at it and never lost a single game, while some are average at best. Of course, if you pick the right word in 3 tries or less, it's mostly luck. But beyond that, you have to plan a little bit ahead, recognize there are more possibilities than available lines, and act accordingly. That's when the game becomes interesting, and gives a little bit of dopamine. Finding the word in <= 3 tries is nice if you want to brag a bit, but not really satisfying. It's when you finally find it at your 5th or 6th try that it's pleasing.

teekert 5y ago

It's nice how things get "pretty damn smart" if you don't optimize for trackable eyeballs on ads.

nnoitra 5y ago

Yet another flappy bird kind of a thing that caught on. It seems pretty boring to me and I don't wonder at all why I didn't have this idea first. It's pretty much a crossword variation.

wesleywt 5y ago
Salty is a five letter word.
- nnoitra 5y ago
  I mean I see it the same way as 2048. I don't think it's anything super-interesting and it's just something that has caught on.

qq66 5y ago

A lot of these are just observations about what you can do with a product when you're not trying to make money from it.

EGreg 5y ago

Am I the only one who doesn’t really get interested in Wordle even after all these explanations?

smuggle 5y ago

For those who want to ruin the fun, I threw together some javascript that gives you suggestions as you play. Link [1]. There are chrome extensions that probably do this better, but I had fun making this. [1] https://gist.github.com/coertg/e8d0fc66c3a56a3c3490c77b7f8122d0 https://gist.github.com/coertg/e8d0fc66c3a56a3c3490c77b7f812...

code_duck 5y ago

It’s extremely obvious that the person who made wordle killed it. What an admirable success.

wedgeantilles 5y ago

Thank you for mansplaining Wordle.

IgorPartola 5y ago

What has been driving me a little nuts about it is the amount of luck involved with getting the word in a few tries. I can reliably get the word in 4 tries give or take. But when you hit something equivalent to *AR you can guess BAR, CAR, PAR, MAR, TAR, JAR, FAR, etc. The number of times I got 4 out of 5 letters on the second try just to finally get the word on the 5th or 6th try feels like I am cheated of a victory.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Pretty inevitable, though; there are some letter groups in english that make that unavoidable. I use this (the second table). https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfrequencies.html https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfr... I memorised STARE/TASER, UNLID, CHOMP (all the letters with more than 3% incidence, in a word order with a good letter distribution close enough to the statistical one, and some useful letter groups) and the remaining significant ones(GBFYWKV) and work with that. If I get a green from the first word I assemble a new word from the letters of the other two; this strategy has seen me guess it in two or three a bit more often. This may be obvious but in your scenario where there are lots of permutations, it's worth considering that you can solve words two ways -- first by thinking of a word that fits the shape available, and second by carefully thinking of the words with the highest frequency unused letters in all available slots (if there are two or three remaining letters, a guess that is likely to provide you two yellows is vastly better than a guess that will provide you one green). If you use a three word opening gambit (which you can't do in 'hard' mode) then you'll regularly guess it in four or five, anyway. I strongly suspect that four is the most common number of guesses for good players.
- cookie_monsta 5y ago
  I keep in mind that OTHER NAILS contains the most common letters, but I play in hard mode and don't use either of those as a start word. My second guesses onwards are made up of clues shown and letters from those two words. I don't understand the fun in playing easy mode and laying down words just to eliminate letters. I see a lot of people saying that it guarantees them a win in 4 moves, but once I adopted the above strategy I regularly started getting 2s and 3s. Four for me seems just ok, no big deal. At five I start making excuses/blaming the injustices of the game. ... and today I got a 5, so I will be signing the NYT petition, plus my elbow hurts /s

wolframhempel 5y ago

Not directly related to the article, but I was just wondering what the best word to start wordle with is - and I think it is ATONE. I arrived there by looking at the most frequent letters in english from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency and putting them into an anagram solver at https://www.thewordfinder.com/anagram-solver/ https://www.thewordfinder.com/anagram-solver/ There is no five letter word from ETAOI (the five most frequent letters) but there are some from ETAOIN (the top six), namely atone, eatin, entia, oaten, tenia and tinea. Wordle doesn't recognize most of these, but it does recognize atone

shrx 5y ago
You can improve this guess by calculating the letter frequency for the 5-letter words only. With the dictionary that I use, the optimal word to start with is AROSE.
CamelCaseName 5y ago
Recently I watched two videos on how to solve Wordle using information theory by ThreeBlues1Brown https://youtu.be/v68zYyaEmEA https://youtu.be/v68zYyaEmEA https://youtu.be/fRed0Xmc2Wg https://youtu.be/fRed0Xmc2Wg
dubbel 5y ago
ATONE is a good one based on letter frequency - I wonder if letter position might lead you to another word, for example one that ends with "ed", "er" or "es". Or has an "e" as the second to last character? Edit: I just read in a comment, plural or past tense words seem to be less common in the Wordle word set, so my example wouldn't make as much sense.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  I use STARE or TASER. Then UNLID and CHOMP :-)
RegBarclay 5y ago
I try to use words that hit the Wheel of Fortune RSTLNE letters - BEAST, RUSTY, ROAST. It's served me pretty well. I haven't had to go beyond the 5th guess yet and commonly solve it in 4.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

toss1 5y ago

>>Some people say the biggest difference between an engineer and a senior engineer is not on the code they write, but on the senior engineer ability to figure out ways to not write code. YES!! The thing I spent the most time on when coding was to avoid writing code. * All code takes longer to run than the no-op * The greatest performance/speed gains are not from optimizing, but from entirely eliminating chunks of code. * All code is habitat for bugs, the more habitat, the more... * More code can unnecessarily obfuscate the structure of the app, and ability to reason about it Some time later, the same principle came up in a seemingly very different field of sportscar racing, when my driving coach asked me "What are the things you do that slow the car down?". I thought of some mistakes I was making, but he pointed me to the big basics - "turning and braking", followed by discussion that the most basic thing to do was to avoid turning and braking. Now obviously, some of both will be needed as soon as you approach the end of the starting straight — the point is to do only the absolute minimum, and that often takes a LOT of work to figure out how to NOT do something. Same applies for writing code - avoid it at all costs, and write only the absolutely required minimum. It is effort well spent

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

Nice insights. A few good design decisions multiply together to make Wordle irresistible to both gamers and non-gamers.

cdubzzz 5y ago

I'm a huge fan of the plain text share functionality that Wordle uses (introduced?). Loving it in the various clones that are coming out as well and I hope it becomes a common "simple share" approach in other applications.

valtism 5y ago
The share functionality was actually taken from a twitter user who started posting her results in that format. It's a very clever way to show your journey without spoiling the results, and almost certainly had a big impact on the virality of the game.
afavour 5y ago
One of my favourite features of Wordle is that the share functionality uses the Web Share API. It’s been available cross platform for a while now but this is the first truly huge use I’ve seen and I think a lot of the games success is because of it.
- cdubzzz 5y ago
  Oh, cool! I did not realize that. Will have to take a closer look at it…

sam1r 5y ago

I agree with OP. Not enough credit goes to how simple, but great of a product Wordle is.

jcims 5y ago

I think it’s about as close to a local maxima as any software product I’ve ever used.

mcenedella 5y ago
Exactly!!

mcenedella 5y ago

The OP does a terrific job detailing the simple beauty of Wordle. Is it OK if we like it more because it was born out of love?: ‘Wordle is a love story’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-game-creator.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-ga... And in the space of a month went from ‘introduced in NY Times’ to ‘bought by NY Times’? ‘The New York Times Buys Wordle’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/business/media/new-york-times-wordle.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/business/media/new-york-t... In many ways, I think this is the perfected ideal of what engineer-creators hope for. The intense focus on making something that feels magical for one - even better that that one is magical to you. Sharing the creation with a few friends and having them experience the magic too. And having the world recognize, and then pay $ millions, for your creation done in the name of love. No years lost in the lab, no fighting with corporate suits to keep ads out, no long marches of ‘growth’ tactics that feel icky. It is the Romantic Ideal of Engineering. Does any other story come close?

kyawzazaw 5y ago
Maybe this - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/25/summly-sold-yahoo-teenage-creator https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/25/summly-so...
- chairmanwow1 5y ago
  Summly was an amazing thing
bobthepanda 5y ago
Stardew Valley doesn‘t have nearly as short of a timeframe but is another labor of love success.
- marricks 5y ago
  I think it's an even better personal success than Wordle, or at least different. It was a man's labor of love for years, which tied together all his interests: music, art, programming, games. And better yet he built a career out of doing all of those things and still owns and maintains it years later. Presumably still loves it too.

egypturnash 5y ago

> It also brings players back into the game, but not in an annoying way like Farmville Facebook notifications. As someone who doesn't play, it's getting more and more annoying. Especially now that there's stuff like Wordle Except It's Four Games At Once demanding space on my social timelines.

alanbernstein 5y ago
Sounds like it's actually the social timelines that annoy you.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Couldn’t FB notifications be blocked before? Which is similar then to saying social timeline vs the game. Not the same, I agree.
  - modeless 5y ago
    You can easily block Wordle scores on Twitter at least. Just add Wordle to your blocked words.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Well yes but that is a whole other rant. It’s been right under the threshold of “annoying enough to remember how to mute a phrase in Twitter’s web client” for a while.
harry-wood 5y ago
Yeah "not in an annoying way" is certainly debatable. Personally I'm not annoyed by it, but I can see why people would be. Whoever made this spoiler bot seemed pretty annoyed by it :-) https://twitter.com/dancow/status/1485660308622528513 https://twitter.com/dancow/status/1485660308622528513
DangitBobby 5y ago
We have a "game" channel in our friend discord channel (like 10 or so if us). All interesting content has been completely drowned out with wordle shares, and there's no end in sight. I'm glad people are having fun, but I would like that channel back.

codeflo 5y ago

Good design is often subtle and easy to dismiss, especially for smart engineers. You might remember the "What's the deal? It's just mastermind with letters" comments here and elsewhere. I agree with the article that Wordle got many little things right, and I think that's a huge part of its success. I wonder how long it will stay that way under NY Times ownership. Just today, I was greeted with a new cookie prompt that covered up the keyboard on mobile Safari and wouldn't disappear without a refresh. Not a good sign of things to come.

ehsankia 5y ago
It's coming one step at a time. First the subtle side bar linking to their other games. They diverged from the answer list. Next they removed all bad words from the dictionary like "bitch" and so on. Now the cookie stuff.

prewett 5y ago

One of the subtle ways he didn't mention is that the words seem to use medium-frequency letters, so they aren't an obvious guess, but it isn't some word with no vowels or a bunch of z's, either. I did notice that after the NYT took over the words now seem to have fewer letters, so it's more necessary to logic out which word it is if you want a good score. Previously I could figure out what most of the letters were with three words, but now I have to work at it. At least until I can come up with well-chosen words for the new regime.

mango7283 5y ago
To be clear, even if the NYT never took over, those words would still have come up, the nyt only removed 6 words, which is a very small amount. Didn't stop people from saying the NYT gentrified the game after tacit came up though, which is it's own commentary on facts and fact finding and confirmation bias
AutumnCurtain 5y ago
The day "jazzy" is chosen is the day Wordle makes some enemies

moskie 5y ago

I've also begun to thing of Wordle as a meme. I know virtually anything could be framed as a meme, but there's specific aspects of Wordle and its rise in popularity that make it a particularly apt description. Its viral spread was fast and resonant. It's super easy to consume. Think pieces dissecting it end up in mainstream publications. The story about its origin gets mythologized. And, most importantly: unending riffs on the base meme. There's basically infinite Wordle clones with slightly (or very) different rules. And the shared results themselves can be riffed on as well. It's done a thing that's usually reserved for image memes: it's created a whole new language that people are using to make fun(ny) things. It's just really interesting to see that happen with a game.

bobthepanda 5y ago
Flappy bird? Temple run?
- moskie 5y ago
  Yup, totally right. Don't have much experience with Temple Run and its clones, but Flappy Bird fits the bill. The fact that there's only a couple games that come to mind reinforces the novelty of it happening again with Wordle though.
  - EZ-Cheeze 5y ago
    I got a high score of 165 on the original Flappy Bird (Samsung Note 3)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zanecodes 5y ago
Another cool instance of this was 2048, when it first came out. I was in college at the time, and for at least a month you could see a half dozen or more games of 2048 on the screens of any given classroom's laptops.

TeaVMFan 5y ago

Having implemented my own 5-letter word game, I can agree that much finesse lies under the covers. Wordii is for the impatient, letting you play more often if you choose: https://frequal.com/wordii/ https://frequal.com/wordii/ The many subtleties of this genre make it a great programming challenge. I encourage developers to try making their own version. I think you'll come away with a healthy respect for Mr. Wardle.

Rayhem 5y ago
I just played and failed, only to get "Sorry, the word was GIBBY" with a link to the "definition" of GIBBY[1] on dictionary.com. Spoiler alert: according to dictionary.com, GIBBY isn't a word. [1]: https://www.dictionary.com/misspelling?term=GIBBY https://www.dictionary.com/misspelling?term=GIBBY
- TeaVMFan 5y ago
  I have removed it, thank you.
phenylene 5y ago
Nice work! Dark mode?
- TeaVMFan 5y ago
  That will be a fun addition. Especially since Wordii is designed for longer play, that makes sense. Expect to see it soon. Thanks!
twobitshifter 5y ago
I have a reasonable vocabulary but I just got the word “copra”. I did get it on the sixth try but only after guessing cobra and realizing there were no letters left that produced words I knew. According to Wikipedia “Copra is the dried coconut kernels of which coconut oil is expelled.” It might be a blind spot in my vocabulary but I haven’t had this happen with wordle. The accessible word list could be considered another genius element of its design.

nemo44x 5y ago

Fun game but becomes fairly automatic when you know the best words to start with.

ghaff 5y ago
There are probably a dozen or two starting words that are probably good choices depending on your strategy but not sure I'd call it automatic at that point.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
function_seven 5y ago
So don't start with those words. Or, force yourself each day to start with one you haven't used yet. That's what I do. I now forget what the "optimal" word is (STARE? AISLE?), but my first guess usually has something like a B or F in it. While it's not optimal generally, it is satisfying when you get the word in 2 or 3 guesses because you lucked into the right initial guess.
AndresNavarro 5y ago
But once you get pretty good at it you can choose to start with a suboptimal word, like a handicap.
mecha_ghidorah 5y ago
I pick a different start word each day to help keep it fresh I have a friend who always users yesterdays word as their first guess
- jbmny 5y ago
  That feels like yet another aspect of Wordle's appeal to me: the fact that it starts with a "clean slate", where you can enter any word you want. It's an opportunity for creativity, spontaneity, and serendipity. One of my favorite parts of the game is pulling that first word out of the air.

dvirsky 5y ago

The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involved in making you play one game per day, no server side calls are involved in gameplay at all. And yes, this means that changing your time zone will let you play tomorrow's game, and that you can just view source to know tomorrow's word - it appears right after today's word in the code. This is so counter to how we usually design software in so many ways, it's just delightful.

the_af 5y ago
I think the full list of words being hardcoded and readily available is not a kind of elegant simplicity, but simply an inelegant compromise to get everything done client-side, which has obvious benefits. It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation.
- neoberg 5y ago
  Why tho? Cheating just takes away from the cheater's experience and doesn't affect anyone else. It's pretty much like any physical game. You can play (or cheat) it any way you like even though the game is designed to be played in a certain way.
  - the_af 5y ago
    I agree with your philosophy against cheating, but still, games must implement some sort of anticheat, just like they must implement some sort of game rules. Imagine not implementing blocking walls in Counter Strike, "just don't walk through walls, it would make the game less fun and why would you ruin the experience for yourself like that?". This is a case where not hiding the word list was done because it was easier to implement Wordle this way. Engineering-wise, it's not elegant, it's a cop-out.

ghaff 5y ago

I actually think the OP and the comments are too focused on the programmer-related aspects of this. I'll add a few things. 1. It's not trivial but it's not that hard if you have a decent vocabulary and some intuitive sense for word frequencies (and word pair frequencies) for different locations in a word. The answer list does not seem to include really hard words as naively picking all the words in the MW dictionary would be. It's a fun 10-15 minute puzzle. 2. Five letter seems like something of a sweet spot. 3. The answer word list does not appear to have a lot of plurals or common vowel endings for past tense, etc. Or obscure words. 4. It lends itself to what I'll casual cheating, i.e. there are easy ways to get some hints without giving the answers away while focusing on a strategy. 5. Basically, it's got good gameplay for a casual game. It would be easy to build something along similar lines that didn't have as fun gameplay for a casual gamer.

friendzis 5y ago
> 3. The answer word list does not appear to have a lot of plurals or common vowel endings for past tense, etc. Or obscure words. I guess it depends on one's vocabulary, but for non-native speaker it sure does have some obscure words and more importantly technical terms. For example TRUSS. While not exactly an "obscure" word, unless one has familiarity with technical construction terminology non-native speaker most probably is not familiar with such a word. It is just not a word one would expect to appear in a fiction book, film or casual conversation.
jasonpeacock 5y ago
#1 is why it's so successful. It's just challenging enough to make you think, but still solvable by most people. So we all get that nice dopamine rush of solving a puzzle with a reasonable perceived effort. How many people don't play the NYT Sunday Crossword b/c they never get more than a few words? There is a very devoted fan base for crossword, but it's not as universal as Wordl's adoption. To me, that's the genius - just hard enough, but not too hard. It's not a Scrabble competition, it's a fun diversion and shared challenge to experience with your friends.
- moritonal 5y ago

senectus1 5y ago

the only design flaw i see is that the color blind mode colors are not intuitive choices. I'm not color blind but I play with some friends who are, I have to switch color pallets to share results. in color blind mode its light blue for right letter wrong spot and orange for right letter right spot. mentally, to me this is the wrong war around.. and it drives me nuts and forces mistakes on my end.

benrapscallion 5y ago

An important aspect isn’t mentioned: the words are five letter words that even my six year old kid can attempt.

xiphias2 5y ago
Also us secondary people (the majority) whose English is not native. My first thinking when I tried wordle was that for sure it's a word that I don't know...but all the words in the main list are known by us as well.
- mango7283 5y ago
  None of them that I've seen are those crazy Scrabble words no one uses, which is a really really great thing about wordles curation.

richardatlarge 5y ago

Did you know… that if you use a letter multiple times but it’s used fewer than that, the extra letters are grayed out - this surprised me but it’s correct to do it

jrochkind1 5y ago

I'm surprised how infrequently I see anyone commenting on the wordle tile-flipping animation. It's... really nice? I like to watch it. I suspect I'm not alone, and if the tiles simply changed color in an instant without animation, wordle would not be as successful.

lanewinfield 5y ago
Agreed. And the feeling of suspense and subsequent satisfaction when they slowly flip all to green is a dopamine hit in and of itself.
taeric 5y ago
My favorite thing in this is that it is easily recreated with about fifteen lines of css. Truly a very well crafted animation that fully builds on the joy of seeing the reveal. Edit: realized my point seems reductionist. I meant that to be that it is not just a technical marvel. The artistic choices that went into building it are truly impressive.
Forricide 5y ago
Josh Wardle, creator of Wordle, was interviewed on the Syntax podcast and they discussed exactly this. I'd paraphrase the segment (it was a really interesting bit on design philosophy) but I don't remember it quite well enough so I'd probably butcher it. But, suffice it to say the creator agrees.
romellem 5y ago
The creator added this specifically to add some “juice,” a phrase from the talk [Juice It or Lose It][1], where they describe it as meaning: > A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do, tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input. He talked about this as the end of a [podcast][2] he was recently the guest on, Syntax [1]: https://youtu.be/Fy0aCDmgnxg https://youtu.be/Fy0aCDmgnxg [2]: https://syntax.fm/show/430/creator-of-wordle-josh-wardle https://syntax.fm/show/430/creator-of-wordle-josh-wardle
mrtksn 5y ago
It's called "juice it or lose it" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

wanderer_ 5y ago

Great thread up in here.... I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said.

wanderer_ 5y ago
I seem to have violated the community guidelines. Apologies...

14 5y ago

I manage to get the word on my last try and it was very satisfying. I've never seen this game before. I was a little sad you only get one word a day.

aklemm 5y ago
So fun to see someone start the journey. Enjoy.

d--b 5y ago

You can’t explain its success by product greatness only. I mean sure wordle is fine. But the no-ad and once-a-day features are what the new york times has been doing for years (and yes it works really well). There are probably _thousands_ of other mini games that are no-ad and once-a-day. The sharing part is pretty cool. It does encourage bragging and probably played a big role in its virality. But yet again, there must be plenty of other games that do that well (and we’ll likely see an awful lot more of them). Again I do think that wordle is pretty good, but its success is more easily explained by lucky timing and reaching some big influencers early rather than amazingly smart design. The reason I am posting this is that I think people shouldn’t think that if they build something as good they will have the same success. And I find it a bit dishonest to say “oh of course it had some success, it’s so great” after the fact.

scaramanga 5y ago
Thanks. It's hard to say this without feeling like you're taking away people's moment of being happy about a rare example when someone got lucky who we feel really deserved it. But I think you're quite right, we can't take it as proof that good things succeed or that bad things must fail. And it doesn't hurt to be gently reminded of that reality, especially in these moments.
Kiro 5y ago
I think it's more than luck. Wordle was made by the same guy that created r/place and The Button so he clearly knows how to make viral things.
- d--b 5y ago
  Well, this also means that he already has a certain visibility, which definitely helps kickstart virality.
  - Kiro 5y ago
    Or he just has a knack for creating viral things.

sedatk 5y ago

I'd mentioned how Wordle clones failed to copy its success because they didn't understand what made it unique before, the article does a decent job too: https://twitter.com/esesci/status/1481734261434507268 https://twitter.com/esesci/status/1481734261434507268

ehsankia 5y ago
I don't think it's entirely true. Many have managed to create alternatives that have gotten serious traction. There's a few I've been consistently playing for a week and honestly enjoying more than Wordle itself. I've been playing Quordle, and sometimes it's more insane alternatives [1] [2]. I've also really been enjoying Semantle [3], it's probably one of my favorite and most unique ones. There's other ones that are also need but maybe too much, like Squabble [4] and Squardle [5], but I wouldn't say they've all failed. Also, to say "the game itself is mediocre at best" seems ridiculous. A mediocre game doesn't get popular purely based on once a day and sharing... [0] https://quordle.com/ https://quordle.com/ [1] https://octordle.com/ https://octordle.com/ [2] https://sedecordle.com/ https://sedecordle.com/ [3] https://semantle.novalis.org/ https://semantle.novalis.org/ [4] https://squabble.me/ https://squabble.me/ [5] https://fubargames.se/squardle/ https://fubargames.se/squardle/
- sedatk 5y ago
  Mastermind and alike have existed in many different forms over decades. None of them became as popular as Wordle, not even close. It's been mediocre and outdated for a long time. But, Wordle has features that makes it unique, welcoming, and viral. The alternatives you quote aren't even close. That doesn't mean none of them can catch up with Wordle. I was saying that most of them was getting it wrong (like removing daily word limits, making the game harder, more convoluted, asking for signup, adding ads, etc). Nope. That's not going to work.
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    The ones I named all keep the daily limit and don't have ads/signup. I don't think they're overly hard or convoluted either.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordle https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordle mechanics are nearly identical to the 1955 pen-and-paper game Jotto and the US television game show Lingo He had created a similar prototype in 2013, the prototype allowed for endless play, with players able to play puzzles immediately after each other, and its wordlist was unfiltered. In mid-October 2021, he made it public after it "rapidly became an obsession" with relatives The game became a viral phenomenon on Twitter in late December 2021, after Wardle added a sharing element to the game, letting users copy their results in the form of a grid of colored square emoji. The feature was inspired by a group of friends from New Zealand

croes 5y ago

Mastermind with words. It's success reminds me of Flappy Bird. It's a mass phenomenon not a great game.

zgs 5y ago

Wordle is a spam engine. The game isn't that difficult -- it's been solved by several folks and it can always be won. The "share" button is the spam engine. If you play to enjoy it and don't press "share", well done. If you press "share", be ready to burn in the level of hell reserved for spammers. Fortunately, the NYT will screw this up and try to monetise it which will destroy its popularity in a short time.

shp0ngle 5y ago

> No ads, no log-in No ads, no log-in so far

syntaxing 5y ago

I think it’s also worth noting that the creator of Wordle was also the creator or Reddit place. His ideas are pretty novel and interesting

robbiep 5y ago

Effectively there are 2 wordles at the moment - the my times link has a different word and I was using the old uk link and so my partner and I are having different words. Pretty funny/an opportunity to do the ‘crossword’ twice a day! (For however long they keep it up!)

TylerE 5y ago
It (the old version at least), is pure client-side... just download a copy and never worry about it going away.
- robbiep 5y ago
  ooh interesting - thanks! running from the same seed do you think, or a list that will iterate in a consistent manner across other users?
  - mango7283 5y ago
    It's a hardcoded list, the NYT removed some words but didn't change the rest, so "old wordle" is just a few words behind "NYT wordle"
    - robbiep 5y ago
      Ahh thanks! Unfortunately I upgraded to a new phone last night and have now lost it…

neltnerb 5y ago

I don't know if this is relevant, but it's been driving me nuts. Wordle is a game that was on the speak and spell in like 1990. It had a different name. It taught me how to spell a lot of words, and especially about patterns of where letters are found. It was actually my favorite game on the toy at the time, so maybe that says something about it just being a fairly fun game whether you get one word or not... I totally support turning this into an educational game for elementary school kids though, that really seems like how it's a smart game. It teaches you not just spelling but how letters combine, it's amazing. edit: Let them get addicted to spelling instead of, I dunno, youtube. For adults maybe one a day totally makes sense. For kids? Let them go wild.

GCA10 5y ago

One more factor in Wordle's popularity that I haven't yet seen commentators identify much. The game's word roster tilts heavily toward words with neutral or cheerful connotations. So your brain conjures up something happy at the end. You don't slog through the puzzle solving to end up with VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE or other such morose words. Instead, we get the likes of AWAKE, BLUSH, FOCAL, etc. That helps make the game a mood-stabilizer or even brightener. We're usually clever enough to find a solution most days. When we're slow and need all six turns, we get a cheery "Whew!" to console us. It's a simple, barely noticeable bit of gamification at its nicest.

deckard1 5y ago
Valentine's Day was CYNIC, which I did find humorous.
alskdjflaskjdhf 5y ago
>One more factor in Wordle's popularity that I haven't yet seen commentators identify much. The game's word roster tilts heavily toward words with neutral or cheerful connotations. >So your brain conjures up something happy at the end. You don't slog through the puzzle solving to end up with VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE or other such morose words. Ironically, SLAVE was actually one of the future solution words in Wordle pre-acquisition. The NYT removed it from the planned solutions. https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/15/22934587/wordle-solutions-changed-new-york-times https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/15/22934587/wordle-solutions...
- danachow 5y ago
  They removed it from the master dictionary as well.
  - megapolitics 5y ago
    That may have been accidental. The array used to store valid guesses did not contain any of the words from the result array. Both are checked when you make a guess to determine whether it’s a valid guess. Removing a word from the result array also removes it as a valid guess unless it’s added to the other array. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt considering they also removed “inoffensive” words like “Agora” and say their removal as valid guesses was unintentional.

o_____________o 5y ago

I've been enjoying worLdle: https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/ https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/

ep103 5y ago
quordle is where its at

dionidium 5y ago

In addition to everything else already discussed — the game is really well done, the sharing feature is inspired, the animations are delightful, etc — the thing about Wordle that makes it so universally popular is that it’s a very easy game that is experientially difficult. You have 6 guesses of 5 letters. There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet. Anyone in the top few deciles of verbal ability should hardly ever lose (if ever, really; I’ve played about 50 times and never “lost”). People further down in verbal ability will still win quite often. And yet…it actually does engage your brain quite a bit! Despite being ultimately very easy, which people find rewarding, the experience feels challenging. This is an odd combo. I’m having trouble thinking of any other games with this property. It’s more like a word search than a crossword puzzle. It takes work to complete a word search, but everybody has the tools to do it.

suzzer99 5y ago
I've lost when I got into a situation with three green letters, no yellow letters, and a ton of valid words remaining with the other 2 slots. Can happen with one open slot too.
- qq66 5y ago
  In that situation you don't keep guessing at the word... you enumerate the possibilities and guess a word that you know is wrong but will cut down your search space.
  - Narishma 5y ago
    Doesn't work in hard mode.
- shawabawa3 5y ago
  Unless you're playing on hard mode you can do a known wrong guess to eliminate more potential letters

gpvos 5y ago

Sharing a Wordle result is the first application of coloured emojis that has been useful to me. Laughing or crying faces and hearts are nice, but don't really offer much over text emoticons like :-), <3 and such. But this method of sharing was not possible before coloured boxes were available as characters.

Biganon 5y ago

My friends and I love Wordle. I made a Discord bot that picks a random French word every day at 8 AM and 8 PM, and we guess it in the chat. I added a rule so that you can't make two guesses in a row, in other words players must take turns making guesses, so one person cannot just brute force the game immediately. We don't limit ourselves to 5 letter words, and it's really fun when the word is very long. Sometimes it takes a long time to find the word! A weird issue is finding a list of words that contains every valid French word. It's harder than I thought. I'm not talking about the target words here, but the valid ones that you can use to guess. I thought the 300,000 word list I had found would be good enough, but some pretty basic words such as "Parabolique" are missing. The correct solution would probably be to use a dictionary file instead, instead of a plain list, but I'm not sure there's a python library to parse dictionary files, say the ones from libreoffice. Also a fun bug was that since I use two completely different lists for the target words and the valid words (the target words list is a list of pretty common French words, it contains ten times fewer words than the valid words list, and it comes from another Internet source), there were words in the target word list but not the valid word list. Due to the order of the checks I do, the target word was deemed incorrect! My friends were certain they had found the correct word, the clues only allowed for one word, but it was rejected again and again. Now I've made sure the target word list is strictly a subset of the bigger list.

scambier 5y ago
For you words list, you can look here: http://www.3zsoftware.com/fr/listes.php http://www.3zsoftware.com/fr/listes.php
jgtrosh 5y ago
That's a good idea! Of course, there's no easy way to share it with other people, since it has to be on a shared medium. For anyone else looking for a >5 letter French worldle, check out SUTOM [1]; it took me a while to try it out but the long words are a nice change and the motus sounds are delightful. Please look again into libreoffice dic files, they're plain ASCII with a number of entries in the first line and you can probably s#/.*## the end of the lines (or maybe expand to include the alternate endings, as you wish). [1]: https://sutom.nocle.fr/ https://sutom.nocle.fr/

blobbers 5y ago

That bit at the end about Senior Engineers seemed a little bit of a stretch.

thom 5y ago

If we’re honest, is Wordle not popular because it’s a trivially easy game just obfuscated enough to convince us we’ve done something clever each day? It’s only slightly more taxing than rolling a d6 and tweeting the result.

jdrc 5y ago

> but not in an annoying way like Farmville Facebook notifications. Shared Wordle games actively improve your experience by adding a social factor. It's no different than any other social games. It's still novel, so people don't call it annoying ... yet I like the idea of sharing everywhere with a picture or emojis, because it means the game has no archive or hall of fame, which means users are incentivized to store it in their social media, which made it more viral. IT's a clever way to escape the limitations of social media platforms. But OTOH without archive or some long-term goal most people will find it pointless and give up soon. The article seems to imply that wordle is the first game that did all those things. That's not true, each of those elements has been done before, but this game does contain a combination of them.

shawabawa3 5y ago
It is different because it doesn't link to anything, doesn't have a call to action, no "free gems!" etc