This is a collection of terms for thinking about Wordle results as game design tools, in the hopes that it will provoke some ideas for the Wordle Jam that I’m hosting for the rest of the month. You are free to use, edit, republish, etc. any of this article as you see fit if you find it useful to include in your games.
A lot of this is taken or adapted from my ongoing deranged wordle thread. The TLDR of both the thread and this article is probably these two tweets:
https://twitter.com/mrfb/status/1479877379417858052?s=20
https://twitter.com/mrfb/status/1479901099381379077?s=20
Matthew R.F. Balousek (@mrfb) 💖 January 9, 2022 Mount Vernon, NY
<aside> 📖 Table of Contents
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Wordle is a game by Josh Wardle (@powerlanguish). It lives at powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle. The New York Times wrote about it recently, I guess, but the site I use to skip paywalls doesn’t work on the NYT anymore so I dunno what that article was about.
Anyway—when you play Wordle you get a thing that looks like this:
There are these instructions and settings, also:
“Hard Mode” feels like a misnomer. It’s more like “error checking”.
After you play, you might end up with a board kind of like this:
When you finish a puzzle, you get a screen like this:
yes, i have only been playing for a week and i am doing this
...and that “Share” Button will copy to your clipboard a thing like these, which is probably the first way you’ll have heard about or interacted with Wordle.
Wordle 199 5/6
⬛⬛⬛⬛🟨
🟩⬛⬛⬛🟩
🟩⬛🟨⬛🟩
🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Wordle 200 3/6
⬜🟨⬜🟨🟨
🟩🟨🟨🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Wordle 201 3/6
⬜⬜⬜🟩⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Notably, the information about the words you guessed are stripped out of these share results. Which makes sense, because everyone is trying to guess the same word everyday, so sharing your guesses without some kind of opt-in thing like the spoiler tags on Discord could potentially spoil the puzzle for someone else.
I’m going to call these grids of colored square emoji mosaics, because they look like mosaics, and because that’s fun to me.
I make games, and I like weird dice, so it goes without saying that I like thinking of the mosaic as a means of random number generation that I can then use to make games with. To that end, what follows is a breakdown of what wordle results can do, or, in fancy design terms, their affordances.
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➗ A fun game is looking at other people’s near-guesses and trying to work out what they guessed. I think #199 was SIEGE, and the Discord that day was bitterly divided between #teamSINGE and #SIEVEgang.
Dark times, but we are all reunited by the siege
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Wordle 199 5/6
⬛⬛⬛⬛🟨
🟩⬛⬛⬛🟩
🟩⬛🟨⬛🟩
🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Wordle 200 3/6
⬜🟨⬜🟨🟨
🟩🟨🟨🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Wordle 201 3/6
⬜⬜⬜🟩⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
199, 200, and 201 in the examples above.
There’s one puzzle per day, that resets at midnight in your local time. These are useful for comparing results, but also might be something to inherit in games based on these results for cross-reference.
At worst, it is a number which is slowly increasing over time and which measures days. That’s often a useful thing! You can use it to structure conditions and branches, such as:
on even days, follow the rules on page 2
on odd days, follow the rules on page 6
on days evenly divisible by 10, you must instead drink a glass of water and read that book that’s been collecting dust on your nightstand for longer than you’d care to admit
on days evenly divisible by 100, you must instead destroy this game and never look back. run. run!