THIS week it seems Worldle has absolutely exploded across social media.
If you think it’s just you whose timeline has filled up with little colourful squares, it’s not. In fact, the game has more than 300,000 players around the world just two months into its release – and that figure is growing fast.
Wordle is a simple, ad-free online word game. It was created by Josh Wardle, a software engineer based in New York, initially just for his partner Palak Shah who is a big fan of word games.
These are the basic rules of Wordle:
- Every day the puzzle game presents one five-letter word. Everyone playing the game gets the same word.
- Those playing enter any five-letter word into the boxes
- If they get a letter right – but it’s in the wrong place – the box turns gold
- If the letter is right and in the correct place, the box turns green
- If the letter is not included in the word at all, it turns grey
- Players try to guess the word within six guesses
Many people have then decided to take to Twitter to show how they solved the day’s grid without spoiling the answer - hence the little squares.
The game is hosted on a web page and doesn’t have a smartphone app – something which Wardle told the BBC this week would stay that way.
"I am a bit suspicious of mobile apps that demand your attention and send you push notifications to get more of your attention," Wardle told Radio 4.
"I like the idea of doing the opposite of that - what about a game that deliberately doesn't want much of your attention? Wordle is very simple and you can play it in three minutes, and that is all you get.
“I am not doing anything with your data, and that is also quite deliberate."
One software engineer on Twitter named Katherine Peterson revealed last week that she had designed a version of Wordle allowing people to play more than once a day.
Have you been playing Wordle? Let us know in the comments below!
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