Over the years, we have seen several examples of games that come from nowhere and are suddenly played by more or less everyone. A classic example is Flappy Bird which was a great success before the Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen got enough of the attention and put the game in the mothballs.
The latest example of an unexpected success is Wordle, a pun launched by Welsh developer Josh Wardle as recently as October 2021.
The game is basically a variant of Jotto, a logical pun from 1955. The most famous variant is Lingo, a game that has been broadcast on TV4 in various rounds between 1993 and 2013.
How to play Wordle
Wordle is a web game, which means you play it in a web browser. So you do not need to download any files to your computer, touchpad or mobile phone, which partly explains the game’s popularity.
Your task in Wordle is to identify an English word of five letters in a maximum of six attempts, something reminiscent of the classic board game Mastermind.
For example, you can start by typing “steam” and if any letter is included in the word, it will be highlighted in yellow. If the letter is also in the right place, it is marked in green. If the letter is not included at all, it is marked in gray.
To find the right word quickly, it is a wise strategy to try to identify as many letters as possible at an early stage, so then you can, for example, select “clung” in the next round because this word uses letters other than “steam”.
The colors of the different letters can be seen on the virtual keyboard and hopefully you will have time to solve the mystery in time. Then you have to wait for the next word, because only one word is published a day.
Watch out for expensive clones!
Its popularity has led developers around the world to see a chance to make easy money by creating Wordle clones of the same or similar names.
After that appeared a variant that costs 30 dollars per year chose Apple to remove all clones from the App Store, but on other platforms there are still plenty of copies.
Given that Wordle is completely free to play, there is no need to pay for any of the copies, at least not as long as you do not get any more features on the purchase.
If you prefer Swedish words, we can recommend Ordnille, also a game that can be played for free in the browser.
