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.
When I first discovered Wordle, I immediately looked for a way to keep playing with new random words, something that most clones have implemented.
After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. What makes it fun to spend 10 minutes on the game is that it's the only round of the day so there's a pay-off to giving it some thought. When you can keep playing new rounds, it's just not rewarding and I would just close the tab when I was stumped.
Had I invented Wordle, I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day which is surely one of the critical elements of its success.
Absolutely. If that limitation wasn't there, the game would've definitely fizzled out within days and maybe even never made to it the popularity it has now. The slow sustained popularity, with people posting their results on the shared daily word is the key to success here.
It's the only reason people are still talking about it more than a month later.
Strongly disagree on this assertion. Each to their own, so I'm not going to pretend that we're having an objective discussion here to start with :P. Personally the wordle model works for, something like wordle, but doesn't extend much further. I lose interest in a story fairly quickly if slowly drip fed over weeks and months. As a result I have watched FAR more shows after Netflix model than before it; I suspect I'm not the only one. I will wait until all episodes are released first to even start watching now; but often, don't continue with shows with HBP release model at all and move on to something else. The entire point of a story (for me atleast) is to get sucked into a different world and find out more while your mind is engaged. The "pay off" waiting a week to find the next bit of information is far less than the friction of first, abruptly being thrown off your train of thought, and secondly, to start caring about the story a few moments before or as the next episode is being played. Its like chasing a deep bug in the weeds of legacy code base and then suddenly having to have to switch context for a week and then told to chase that bug again. Even if I find it next time, there's no satisfaction anymore.
To be fair there's two things at play here. On the one hand, I agree it may be more enjoyable for you to watch it all at your own pace. On the other hand, I think it's objectively true that the HBO/Disney model does more to keep a show in the headlines and the cultural pulse. Look how shows like WandaVision dominated Twitter every week for 2 months. The only two shows that have managed to have staying power on Netflix were Tiger King and Squid game.
Game of Thrones really showed how successful it can be. Season 1-4 really was an amazing time to be a fan.
But that also made it possible for them to succumb to mainstream fan culture, the cult of the badass and so on, they wanted to ride the attention wave :(
> Had I invented Wordle, I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day
This is the core mechanic of a newspaper crossword (or the NYT Spelling Bee) which inspired Wordle. It’s really no surprise when you think of it that way.
I have been playing Quordle as well, and now find Wordle very slow and dull. I'll persist as long as my streak is active (60+ or whatever) but bail if it breaks. I play 10-20 games of Quordle a day and find it more interesting, challenging with IMO more difficult words, etc.
But I can appreciate that one shared round was key to Wordle being noticed.
Yeah they added links to dictionary, which as a non native speaker, find great (I was already searching for words I didn't know, and now it's super convenient)
I've also tried Octordle now, that one's super challenging. In a harder version like that one, having a practice mode you can repeat as much as you want can be addicting on its own
I tried the Octordle one and found it easy enough but awkward to play. Quordle seems like the winning combo. The way I've found to keep Quordle really interesting is trying to win in six moves as many times as possible (got it nine times so far), and then trying to finish in seven more times than nine. That's made the Practice Mode "sticky" for me.
quordle seems to be the ideal number of boards, 8 and 16 get too easy because most of the letters show up somewhere and you get into the mopping up phase pretty soon.
This mechanic you describe is actually quite common in freemium games. Games like Farmville don’t let you burn yourself out and purposely make you wait and come back hours or days later to get that dope rush.
> This mechanic you describe is actually quite common in freemium games. Games like Farmville don’t let you burn yourself out and purposely make you wait and come back hours or days later to get that dope rush.
They don't do it to avoid burnout, they do it as a payment gate-keeper: you have to pay to progress in any meaningful way.
The daily bit is clearly modeled off the New York Times daily word puzzles, and it's obvious why the NYT bought it to add it to their collection of daily word games.
True, but so long as you play it at roughly the same time every day, you're going to encounter a new puzzle at that time, time zone differences notwithstanding.
> I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day which is surely one of the critical elements of its success
It's different anyway, but how are people building routines around remembering to visit a certain website once a day? Do they just see the shares on Twitter and remember to go play themselves? Do they bookmark it? I certainly can't build a routine around a novelty like Wordle.
Making the whole thing client side also let him scale from a small handful of users to literally millions with basically zero additional work.
I hope it inspires future devs to let go of feeling like they absolutely need to beg or require users to create accounts to capture email addresses just so they have a chance at monetizing their thing. Wordle may not have ever caught on if it were preemptively over-engineered: it could've added friction to the onboarding, the site could crash, etc.
You can just build a great MVP and let it loose into the world, then see what happens.
I wish I were smart enough to coin a catchy phrase that means "the moment some software dropped in quality, when they decided to add user accounts", because I see this quite a lot.
This actually hurt to read, having used Postman since its launch. It was such a great, simple product then with a simple premise - easily make http requests from a simple ui. Since then, feature after feature has been added, now it's just total bloatware cruft, to the point where after having taken a break for several years, I found it relatively difficult to use upon return (especially if you want to avoid sign up). I see they've recently gotten a series d (!?) of $225 million, so good for them I guess, but it's not something I almost ever use any more, and no longer feel drawn to...
Ditto. I used Postman pre-rework and then came back and had to spend 10 minutes trying to find the page to make an actual callout. And I still can’t find it on the first try whenever I re-use the service.
In order to use a websocket connection with postman you need to be signed into postman.
I would love to switch to something else, unfortunately postman is the only tool I know which has built-in debugging tools for socket.io
Yes, I left Postman immediately after rework because I couldn't understand how the hell to use it anymore.
Same with Docker Desktop. I tried to use it for personal use a few weeks ago and couldn't figure out how to docker build a container anymore on WSL, then tried on native Windows and it was jabbering on about HyperV prereq and I just uninstalled it and went back to WSL for traditional package management.
> Making the whole thing client side also let him scale from a small handful of users to literally millions with basically zero additional work.
But everyone on HN is telling me that I should move away from client side and render everything server side! In fact, all state should be server side! Use a fancy library that opens a web socket and turn the users 4+core computer into a mindless zombie controlled by a .25CPU VM somewhere.
Because web servers are really good at serving up static files.
That is it. I get to make an app, deliver it through the web, and not worry about server resources. I do have to worry about making the app not suck, but as a software engineer I should always be worrying about that! Web, mobile, desktop, making code not a bloated mess is kind of important no matter where it is running.
You're dumping all the compute requirements onto the client. But that's not always a bad thing. When done good, it's pretty good. Prime example: Worldle. No need to hate frontend.
Removing any friction for new users or players is such a huge deal, more sites should embrace this approach. Similar to how Facebook created ghost users for everyone, why not make this explicit? There are a number of plugins for popular web frameworks that create temporary user accounts for each visitor, allowing them to use the site just like a regular user. This way it's a bit more sophisticated than plain old sessions which allows it to be integrated in existing sites as well.
And if the visitor abandons the site their data will just be garbage-collected after a while.
I forgot to play one day, so at just after midnight, I set my TZ to Hawaii to catch up. After I finished, I set it back to PST.
When I went to play the next day's game, it acted like I had already solved the puzzle at midnight. I had to manually edit localStorage to fix my state (or presumably skip a game).
This was when it was still hosted on Josh's site, but be weary of changing TZs to get other day's puzzles. The game might get confused.
Yeah I had the same thing happen. I would jump ahead two hours to play it at night. This morning it kept showing me the same 3-day-old game, no matter what I did. I had to clean out cache, local storage, cookies and everything to finally get it to start playing again.
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.
> an inelegant compromise ... It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation
What would you change specifically? Adding an API call backed by servers / lambdas? The creator mentioned it costs in the tens of dollars per month to run wordle for 10s of millions of daily players. Having to run servers would not only add a ton of cost, but now be vulnerable to latency spikes, ddos, downtime.
Wordle scaled to 10s of millions in a few months, without any latency or downtime. Pretty elegant in my book.
Well yes, an API call or an encrypted/hashed DB of words so at least it's not casually accessible.
I understand that the costs might be an issue, but this doesn't make the solution "elegant". This is the kind of code I wrote as an 8-year old in BASIC, like I mentioned elsewhere, and even my young self understood back then it wasn't a satisfying solution, I just didn't know how to hide secret literals.
I mean, I enjoy Wordle as much as the next person, but let's not make it into some engineering achievement when it's clearly not one.
I'd argue that it's not. Puzzles in the newspapers also don't hide secrets, the answers are on the next page or upside down. And for wordle, the vast majority of players don't even know the solutions can be found in the source (because they don't know what that means), and most of the ones who do know that don't look anyway because otherwise what's the point of playing.
Having the solutions viewable client side may not be engineering elegance, but in this case I do think it is product elegance.
Adding the DB or servers you mentioned would mean costs continue to increase with # of users, which would then create pressure to figure out how to make money off of wordle. Then comes logins, ads, or at the very least donation requests
What's the problem with making the words accessible? It's not a secret. It is most definitely an engineering achievement. The author actually had a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve and he achieved that goal in a very minimal and scalable way. Engineering achievements don't have to be innovative complex codebases.
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.
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.
Well, cheating is less important than in Counter Strike, but not entirely unimportant either. Playing Wordle has a social component.
I think this solution is neither elegant nor terrific. It's simply completely ignoring the problem and claiming that it doesn't matter anyway. I obviously disagree.
PS: when I was a kid, I learned programming on my C64 with BASIC. Like many kids, the first programs I wrote were "guess the thing" kind of games. Usually "guess the number", but occasionally "guess the word". Even back then I understood that hardcoding the word in the program listing was less than ideal, but I just didn't know how to do better. Let's say that 8-year old me would not have been positively impressed if told that Wordle had the "elegant" solution of storing the list of words in its source code.
I think cheating would matter if there was individual words tied to an account. But not when the design says every browser session on the planet gets the same word.
Fair enough, but then it's not an "elegant" decision we should be in awe of (as in the title "Wordle is pretty damn smart").
It's just the default of "I decided not to tackle this problem because it's hard and not a priority for my design". This was also what I defaulted to with my C64 BASIC games when I was a kid, "I don't know how to hide this, so I won't".
...and it's trust model extends there too. It copies your "Achievements" into your paste buffer and you paste them to share. One could easily edit their results, but they'd be cheating themselves too. There's not need for technical restrictions on a player ruining their own satisfaction.
> Replace Counter Strike with a single player FPS then.
Single player games included cheatcodes hard-coded in them since forever. Those that didn't had "trainers" which fiddled with game memory with the same effect. Howver, invincibility and infinite ammo tend to ruin the game for most people.
But the equivalent analogy to Wordle in this case would be not implementing the letter check or not hiding the correct answer until you figure it out. That mechanism exists.
I would have done most of this in a different way, but looking at how this guy solved all those problems made me really stop and think about how I approach problems, and I actually think he did it in a more elegant way that I would have.
> This is so counter to how we usually design software in so many ways, it's just delightful.
It's letting go of notions of what makes good code. I had a Moment like that doing Pico-8, since you can only fit 40 or so characters on screen, all the tutorials just use dirty, single or two letter variable names, and since everything is small and you learn a few neat tricks about variables (velocity, coordinates, the mod operator), the code can be really compact... and filthy. It's great.
If you like the code-golfing aspect of it, I suggest you take a look at the #tweetcart hashtag on Twitter, there are some incredible demos in 280 chars or less.
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.
#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.
I'm actually sort of a "word" person. I've written books for publishers and do a fair bit of writing for my job. But crosswords have always fallen into the too much work category for me and I've never really connected to word games in general (including Scrabble).
But, yeah, I like Wordle and it hits a sweet spot for me.
I played pretty high level Scrabble for a few years and most people who connect deeply with Scrabble are programmers, mathematicians, musicians, scientists, accountants, etc. Hardly anybody at the medium-to-high levels of play are word people.
At its core, Scrabble is just a game of probability, memory, spatial awareness, and pattern recognition. The words could be random collections of symbols.
My dream version of Scrabble would have a score system somehow based on word infrequency, so more interesting words would gain higher scores, exactly to mitigate the phenomenon you describe here.
It’s a fun thought but how do you define infrequency and what is an interesting word?
ANESTRI is a very uncommon word by most “normal” measures (it’s the plural of anestrus, a period of sexual dormancy) but it’s (among) the most likely (by probability) 7-letter word played in tournament Scrabble games — there’s something like 9 anagrams of ANESTRI.
Keeping a rolling social history via some sort of merge-friendly approximate frequency data-structure (e.g., count-min sketch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch ) would allow you to score the game dynamically based on the play history of the current players, their friends, or others with similar or different characteristics (e.g., "We're playing Brooklyn Scrabble now!").
Yes it’s certainly not a trivial problem. Assuming the requirement for a digital component in order to compute word scores, perhaps frequency could be weighted by previous (competition?) word plays.
That would just reward people who spend years memorizing entire dictionaries. Scrabble is already too skewed in favor of the elite players, IMO.
As paulcole says about chess, "the better player nearly always wins," and that's a problem when the only way to win is to turn the game into an obsession or a career. A big part of Wordle's appeal is that a reasonable vocabulary, and not a savant-level one, is all you need to bring to the table.
Fascinating. Although I can program I’ve basically ended up as someone who can do fairly in-depth technical writing among many other things. And I’m not generally a word puzzle fan.
I can’t program but for awhile I wrote for a living.
I was an English major in college and got hooked on Scrabble after reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, a sportswriter from The Wall Street Journal. I’d always been into gambling and games with a luck factor like poker, backgammon, cribbage, etc., so that might have something to do with it. Always hated chess because the better player (nearly) always wins.
Scrabble’s an interesting game but unless you’re very talented at anagramming and have a good memory, it’s a bit of a slog to learn enough of the “rules” of the game (the words) to make it really fun. At my “peak”, I was studying 20 or so hours a week and wasn’t even making progress anymore, just maintaining the stuff I’d already learned.
It was a way to pass a few years of my life. I traveled around to tournaments, sometimes won enough to break even, met some interesting weirdos, and had a good enough time. But one day I just had enough and put it down and never picked it up again. Just stopped thinking it was fun, I guess.
Biggest thing I took away from it was really seeing how a few minutes (and eventually a few hours) of work a day could help you change how your brain works and how you see the world. I vividly remember one day at work I saw a guy whose name badge said Demetrius. I instantly thought “oh if you add a ‘u’ to his name and rearrange the letters it spells ‘deuteriums.’”
Now, when I think something is too hard or too big to accomplish, I think about that and just start chipping away.
come back to tourney Scrabble! I see that we almost overlapped and played in the Phoenix nationals but different divisions. I was addicted until Feb 2020, then the pandemic started, so we made a site to let us play online tournaments (https://woogles.io)
Ha, yeah we definitely know some of the same people. I remember that Phoenix Biltmore being so expensive I shared a room with like 7 other 25-year old guys for the week. Was a really great time. Some of the after hours anagrams games blew my mind.
Eddie L. at the Portland club got me into distance running and that’s been my main hobby the past decade or so. I’ve gotten really into the NYT Crossword and Spelling Bee, too.
I despise crosswords and love Wordle. to me they are completely different kinds of games. While a huge vocabulary helps with wordle, it's not required, especially since the answer dictionary itself is mostly common words.
Whilst solvable, there's still a skill differential in the scoreboard. So in group-chats, everyone "solves" it, but the person who does it in 2 gets to celebrate (but a chunk of it is luck so it rotates a bit).
"reasonable perceived effort" or maybe "reasonable perceived smarts". I think wordle fools us into thinking we're smart. Even though on some level we know it cannot take genius, it _feels_ like we've done something really clever, against the odds, when when we whittle down the possibilities to one word after just few guesses. It's counter-intuitive how quickly we solve it. Reminds me of the birthday paradox.
The relationship of wordle to cheating is underrated. The fact that it’s so astoundingly easy to cheat (the daily word is global), and falsify your game board (just text) makes dishonesty completely undesirable. If you post 1/1, people will assume you hit the once-a-year lucky first guess, or that you’re cheating. There are no high scores, no leaderboards, no reason other than personal satisfaction to work through the puzzle.
I'm more talking that if you're stuck, it's extremely easy to go to a generic online dictionary and enter some parameters and get to see some options. So you can still be playing a strategy but just not come up with a potential word yourself. It's not about going on social media with your hole in one.
>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.
I like this part. I’m in a 5-person group text where we’re posting our scores every day. Sometimes I’m the first, oftentimes not. When I happen to see a couple of others’ results in the thread, I’ll start to think about what they would have guessed with whatever pattern they posted. Like if I see ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ _ ⬛ , and I’m struggling between guessing "CHART" or "CHANT", I’ll go with CHANT because I assume they went with CHART first.
Along those lines, here's a data analysis pipeline someone put together to guess the current Wordle word based solely on the patterns of guesses in tweets:
> 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.
On #1 - humph was hard for me, I've never encountered it in my reading (maybe I'm not reading a particular genre that uses it? Is it something Jane Austen used?), only got it via a a last ditch guess, because I'm familiar with "harrumph" and I had "-umph" already and "h" was the only prefix that remotely made any kind of sense.
The wordlist definitely isn't perfect, and obviously each person has their own vocabulary, but it still is a key. It's something the creator mentions, if on your first play you run into a stupid word, you probably won't come back the next day. And the fact that the current word list is 1/th the total word count goes to show how many words are ridiculous.
AFAIK his partner actually sifted through all 13k word list and categorized all of them into 3-4 buckets, which is what lead to the final 2.5k answer list.
I saw that there was some grumbling on social media about 'caulk' when it came up - 'how was I supposed to know that word?' etc. Saddened me - you don't need to be a builder or DIY expert to have a vocabulary that includes such terms. It's a modern phenomenon - if a person is shown to not know something they would rather complain about elitism than learn or expand their knowledge.
The NYT notably didn't add words to the list, but a surprising number of people complain they ruined it by adding "obscure" words like "tacit", "swill" and "caulk".
Tbh I can understand never encountering caulk and swill somehow because never did diy or indulge in pig farming or fantasy, but I kinda would have expected "tacit acceptance" to be a common enough phrase if one reads newspapers...
caulk was the word last week though? Nobody I play the game with knew that word. Granted we are not native english speakers. Too hard word every now and then is also unifying experience when everybody stops hating the player and instead hates the game.
I'm not sure about that, given it was used in New Girl, a Fox tv series. The comments thanking new girl for how the solver knew the word was such a refreshing change from "omg NYT ruined it"
...I also learned it was used in
that classic millennial childhood game Oregon Trail (because you can caulk the wagon to cross the river)
Now that I've looked it up I'm "Oh sure." I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have thought of it as a dictionary word or something you would write outside of dialog however.
#3 -- agree, the word list is also really nice. A bunch of plurals or conjugated verbs would really bring down the experience. But that would have been easy to overlook.
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.
>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.
My bad -- and thanks for clarifying that. Must be my small sample so far. If I keep playing Wordle long enough, it looks as if I'll get a full dose of despair after all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of breakout successes follow that formula. While I'm not particularly fond of his work, I have nothing but respect for Toby Fox and the years of work he put into bringing his dream to reality.
The original prototype for Wordle was actually back in 2013 [0]. But yeah he didn't really touch it until mid 2021 when he recreated it from scratch. The improved word list which plays a huge role came then, with the help of his partner classifying all 13k 5-letter words. I believe the share function came much later when he noticed people actually manually typing those colored squares.
Yes this is it isn't it, it is clear how much the motivation matters in the case of Wordle. As it does, in a converse sense, for the games trying to extract as much money as possible from the user.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You could use one guess of BCP to gain more information. That'd eliminate 3-4 out of 7 words in your example with the tradeoffs that you won't win with that guess in particular, but it's better on average
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.
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
I don't play in hard mode, still -- I enjoy the flexibility of solving it both ways.
But I do use a start word and as a rule I will try to reuse all the placed letters if I get a single green.
Mind you, I keep frustrating myself because the redirect from powerlanguage.co.uk to the nytimes.com domain is in my browser history and if you accidentally use it again it destroys your stats. Which is fine today of course because I tried to solve it at 5am and didn't get it ;-) but still.
Eventually I will lose interest. Not sure when. A friend of mine pointed me at Sedecordle and I was like, no, not getting into that, and then there I am, addicted to it.
I started playing an Wordle-like app to get around the one-per-day limitation (I know, sue me), and played probably dozens of rounds per day. I ended up with a simple strategy of always starting with the same 3 words: LAUGH, DIRTY, JOKES which cover all the vowels (and y) and put an S at the end where it's most likely to be found. Generally I can "waste" the first 3 guesses on those words and still find the solution.
Then one day, I typed LAUGH and got 5 greens on the first line! Had to happen eventually, but still...
LAUGH, DIRTY, JOKES is good -- but no C/P/M/N which are all much more frequent than G/J/K/Y.
In my experience, Y is rarely difficult to place; it's almost always obvious when you're going to need it.
And you rarely need to think about J at all -- like with Q and Z, it's usually obvious when you need it. (Not many five letter english words have J anywhere apart from the first letter, and the few that do mostly have it in the second, like EJECT, or uncommonly the third, like MAJOR, though it might
be more common in loanwords like BIJOU I guess).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
Yes, designing a dictionary that is both challenging and reasonable is another challenge for games like this. I made a pass through the dictionary after earlier HN feedback, adding some words for guessing and removing some more obscure words. I'll make another pass.
Oh, I almost forgot, after a Wordii game is over, the word is shown as a hyperlink below the puzzle. The link takes you directly to the definition of the word.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
>>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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
>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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I've really been enjoying Quordle. When I first saw it I thought it was just another clone with an interesting gimmick, but something about it just works so well, it's really fun to play. Going back to the original Wordle almost seems boring afterwards.
It's also one of the rare offshoots that actually iterates on the UX experience and improves on it. I like being able to see if a word exists without pressing enter for example.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.