LONDON: The New York Times announced it has upgraded its Wordle assistant, Wordlebot, introduced earlier this year as a “daily companion” to help analyze your Wordle performance.
With the new update, The New York Times added a number of new features, such as the addition of “slate” to Wordlebot’s list of starting words, a new method of “scoring skills” and modifications to the way the bot restricts its analysis to the group of five-letter words that are known Wordle solutions, which according to the company “puts it on a more even footing with humans.”
Wordle is (arguably) the undisputed game of the year. Every day, users try to guess a chosen five-letter word within six tries. The app has become a daily ritual for millions of users worldwide.
The game is a perfect mix of simplicity, fun and genuine competition. Rachel Orr, a senior design editor at The Washington Post, described Wordle as the “perfect pandemic game” for its ability to absorb our attention through the “pattern-seeking custom it humbly provides.”
Thanks to its “lack of ads, simple interface and a heartwarming origin story,” the daily word guessing game drew millions of players in its brief existence, convincing The New York Times to buy it for an undisclosed seven-figure sum last January.
Since then, a number Wordle spinoffs have sprung up across the Internet, including Worldle, Heardle and even an Arabic version, AlWird, giving rise to an entirely new genre of guessing games.
Among the latest additions to the genre is GuessThe.Game, a Wordle-style deduction test based on video games.
GuessThe.Game was developed by Sam Stiles, a Canada-based software engineer who created the game based on Framed, another Wordle-style game where players guess a mystery movie of the day by viewing still shots. Stiles realized that the same concept could be applied to video games.
“So I decided to whip one up,” Stiles said.
Since its debut in May, Stiles claimed that millions of people had played GuessThe.Game in “nearly every single country on Earth,” and that given the volume of daily traffic, “the game continues to expand virally.”
But Stiles is not the only person to have developed a Wordle-style game during his spare time. The list of spinoffs is long and spans across many different topics and subjects.
For example, Wordle aficionados can choose between Wordle Unlimited, an almost unlimited version of the real game; Quordle, where you are required to solve four Wordles at once; Dordle, where you play with two puzzles; and also Octordle and Sedecordle.
There is also Worldle, a geography guessing game where players are shown the outline of a country and have to guess which one it is; Heardle, the Wordle-style game for music lovers; and Nerdle, a maths game developed by data scientist Richard Mann with help from his daughter and son.
Environmentalists can try A Greener Wordle, which gives climate change-related answers; Airportle instead is designed for frequent flyers who want to test their knowledge of the three-digit airport IATA code; and there is even a game for Taylor Swift fans called Taylordle, where you guess practically anything related to the US pop star.
For the joy of players, new Wordle-style games are popping up every day, with Wordle-mania showing no signs of slowing down.
Even though the majority of Wordle-style games have humble origins and were intended as pure entertainment, some developers do not hide their desire to replicate the Wordle fairytale and cash in.
“In an ideal world, it ends up getting acquired by some brand or publication,” Stiles said, expressing confidence that someday “someone may come along and want to have their brand name associated with it like (Wordle and Heardle) did.”