Wordle
Guess a different five-letter word every day in six attempts or fewer.
Tried and tested by Friday Afternoons
Single player
5 minutes
Requirements
- A web browser
Update - 13/03/2022
Since adding Wordle to Friday Afternoons, everybody under the sun has become aware of it and it now feels a little out of place on a website of lesser-known games. So to compensate, I’ll share my starting words here in the hopes that it helps you with your daily puzzle (I certainly get a lot more three-guess wins since switching to these). The words are:
PAUSE and ROILY
They’re ranked in the 96th and 94th percentiles respectively according to FirstWord (a tool for checking the quality of your opening guess), and between them they tick off all six vowels and the common consonants P, S, R and L. For my money, there’s very little scope for improvement there for players who like to commit two words to their opening recon.
And as an added bonus, here are some variations on Wordle you may not have heard of that mix things up a bit:
- Hello Wordl: offers Wordle puzzles with words that are 4-11 letters in length
- Dordle: challenges you to complete two Wordle puzzles at once within seven guesses
- Quordle: challenges you to complete four Wordle puzzles at once within nine guesses
- Absurdle: appears identical to Wordle at first glance, but is actually powered by an AI that only chooses the correct word once your guesses have backed it into a corner
- Crosswordle: the puzzle you’d get if Wordle and sudoku had a baby - it gives you the final word and has you filling out the rest of the board using logic
- Nerdle: Wordle, but with mathematical equations (e.g. 10+20=30) instead of words
- Worldle: challenges you to guess a country from its silhouette, providing you with the proximity and compass direction from each incorrect guess
- Heardle: challenges you to guess a song from a small section of audio, increasing the length of the clip with each failed attempt
The game Wordle can be found at www.nytimes.com/games/wordle, and plays like the game Bulls and Cows. The challenge is to find a five-letter English word with only six guesses, but each guess gives the player more information about the correct answer's spelling. After submitting a guess, each of its letters will turn to one of three colours: green indicates that the letter is correct and in the right location, yellow means that it's in the word somewhere but in a different place, and grey means that it isn't in the word at all. Fail to find the correct word in six attempts and the game will reveal the answer. Either that or it'll mock you for losing, it was hard to tell which when I threw the game to see what a loss looks like:
There are a number of great things about Wordle: it automatically stores your results data so you can check your performance stats, it offers a hard mode that forces you to use the clues you've uncovered, and it's free to play with no ads. However, the game's best and worst feature is that there is one word per day, and that's it. It's hard to overstate how refreshing it is to play a game of this style that isn't designed to keep its players glued to their phones........... but sometimes I just really want one more word to guess! There's been more than one occasion where I've hung on until midnight to have 'a couple of attempts' at the new puzzle before bed, only to solve it there and then and have no Wordle left for tomorrow.
Another, less-obvious perk to having one word each day is that all players get the same one. This creates a talking point between friends who play the game, and makes it far more sociable than it would be if everyone just ploughed through their own set of random words. Couple this with the excellent share feature that shows exactly how you did without revealing any letters, and the single-player Wordle can become a great group activity.
