Five Letters, Six Chances

By LELA GRIFFIN

What began as a scrapped game in 2013 is now one of the most talked about in 2022. Wordle is a daily word game in which players have 6 chances to guess a random 5-letter word. 

A former software engineer for Reddit named Josh Wardle developed the game. His partner, Palak Shah, had become interested in word games during the pandemic. Consequently, he developed his original prototype so that the couple could enjoy a fun simple game during the long quarantine period. The game was released to the public in October, 2021. It now has millions of players visiting its site daily.

So, how do you play? Most players begin with a word that contains common vowels and consonants. Such words include: adieu, audio, arise, and arose. After the player enters their first guess, the system will categorize the letters within the words into three color-coded categories. Gray signifies that the letter you chose is not in the word. Yellow means the letter is in the word, but not in the place you put it in. Green means the letter is both in the word and in its right position. The player then continues guessing until they’ve run out of chances, or discovered the word Here’s an example of gameplay from Mar 3, 2022(NOT A SPOILER). 

Even though gameplay has been available since late autumn, I only recently heard about Wordle. At Key West High School, it has become quite popular. Inside jokes have already begun between students and teachers regarding how easy or hard we found figuring out the word was. Bryan Fernandez, one of my fellow psychology classmates, remarked he enjoyed playing the game because it gave him the opportunity to learn new words. He also said he feels a lot of satisfaction when he guesses the word on the third try. I have also indulged in the game, and I daresay that it is one of my favorite games at the moment, though it pains me when I find the word, and I must wait until tomorrow for the next challenge. However, it does pace the game, which prevents me (and likely other players) from playing it too much during school.

The New York Times is the new owner and home for Wordle, since they had bought it from its developer for an undisclosed amount on Jan 31, 2022. Hence, the official site for Wordle has moved from www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle, to https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html. Wordle is now among the “portfolio” of fun and challenging word games found on their website. There’s no doubt that it’ll become future nostalgia for many people in years to come.

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