Around the World(le)

A survey of the world of Wordle^(tm) variants

Nowadays, it seems that there’s more or less an expectation of some viral cultural sensation to capture the nation’s fixation every couple of months. The prize for this season’s hottest craze goes to Wordle, a word game where players have a limited number of tries to guess a five letter word. Each guess yields clues that help incrementally guide the player towards the final answer, providing a sort of satisfying buildup that undoubtedly is part of the reason why the game has boomed in popularity. The game also only has one word to guess per day, withholding just enough gratification to keep people addicted while simultaneously allowing people an entire day to discuss their scores/guesses. Evidently this combination has proved quite effective - when you google “Wordle” its own unique little animation pops up. That’s how you know you’ve got a hit.

A typical wordle game

As with any viral sensation, Wordle has inspired a slew of copycats/variants, each implementing the signature “incremental clue giving” gameplay with their own little twists. I’ve had a lot of fun playing both Wordle and the different variants that have spawned out of it, and I thought it’d be cool to compile a list and share some of my thoughts on them. Some have admittedly been kinda poo-poo, others arguably better than the original. At the very least, they’ve provided me with fun little distractions and an excuse to write another post. It’s a sort of New Years Resolution of mine to contribute more regularly to this thing, and as you can tell it’s off to the typical blistering start you’d expect from a New Years Resolution. Maybe this post will be a catalyst for change. Probably not. Maybe I should try to get the New York Times to acquire this as well. A lot more effort went into this newsletter’s title than changing a single letter in my name, so hopefully they’ll take note of that!

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Absurdle

Adversarial Wordle is the name of the game here. Absurdle keeps the core mechanics of the original but adds a diabolical twist; the game will try to make it such that your guesses are as uninformative as possible, dynamically updating the final answer as needed in order to prolong the game for as long as it can. Often it will take multiple guesses before you even get a single green letter, and typical games will often last over the standard cap of 6 guesses.

One of my biggest complaints about the original Wordle is that at times it feels a bit too easy - rarely does it take more than five guesses (even on Hard Mode), and when it does it’s often due to having four of the five letters and needing to cycle through the different possibilities to find the answer. In some sense Absurdle fixes this problem by intentionally designing the game to be as difficult as possible. I think that’s certainly a neat concept. But for me, the manufactured nature of Absurdle’s difficulty makes it fall short for me in terms of actually being an enjoyable game to play. Because of the way Absurdle is designed, racking your brain to come up with guesses feels a bit pointless since you know the game will just render them as useless as possible anyways. Sure, you can try to optimize your strategy to force the game to give the answer in as few guesses as possible (apparently the minimum is four), but doing so seems more like an exercise in computational brute force and less like an actual word-related brain teaser. The most Wordle fun I’ve had has come from hitting home runs off of wacky guesses. Absurdle ensures that these guesses won’t give you that same gratification. And I don’t like that!

Rating: a typical Absurdle starting guess

Squabble

The battle royale craze hits Wordle as Squabble lets you pit your Wordle skills against other people as you race to guess words. If you’ve ever played Tetris Battle, the game kind of operates in a similar fashion. Each player starts off with a health bar that gradually depletes, but correctly guessing words will refill your bar and deliver a blow to someone else’s. In typical battle royale fashion, the last one standing is declared the winner. The game pits you against up to 99 players at a time, leading to intense fast paced action that can be a lot of fun.

Part of the appeal of Wordle for me is the competitive aspect; it’s fun to compare guesses with your friends and see how many it took to get the word for that day. Squabble helps satisfy that competitive itch, but in a decidedly different manner. While I typically try to take my time and enumerate through different possibilities to come up with a next guess in the regular version, here it’s very much go fast and go hard. The best strategy seems to involve coming up with a set list of words to blast through in the beginning and then using the info that gives you to take your best couple of shots. As a result, I find that the game lacks a bit of the creative aspect of sitting back and coming up with more bizarre or outlandish guesses, simply because there isn’t enough time for that.

That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy Squabble. Far from it - I find the format to be quite fun and pretty well executed. Often times the words Squabble uses will actually be somewhat hard to guess in the first place, which helps leave some aspects of word wizardry in while preventing the game from becoming a pure typing contest. It also helps that the competition I’ve ran into in the couple of times that I’ve played the game has actually been pretty decent as well. I’d consider myself at least average at “competitive Wordle” (whatever that may mean), but I have yet to achieve an outright victory in the Battle Royale mode (have had a couple second place finishes though). Competitive games are often only as fun as the competition you find, and as Wordle dies out the caliber of player you find on Squabble will probably follow suit. For now, though, if beating your friends by one or two guesses on the actual Wordle every day isn’t enough, Squabble might be the game for you.

Rating: a friendly sight on your way to a #1 Victory Royale

Quordle

You know what’s better than one Wordle? How about four! Enter Quordle, where players solve four Wordle boards simultaneously. Guesses are propagated to all four boards at the same time and players have nine guesses to solve all four boards. Since it takes four guesses to get each of the four words, nine guesses in total isn’t a lot, and players need to be strategic if they want to have a chance at winning.

While Absurdle ramps up the difficulty in a manner that I feel is a bit artificial and cheap, Quordle does it in a way that feels a lot more natural. With four different words to think about at the same time, an extra dimension of strategy in figuring out how to best optimize across multiple boards at once is added, which I find really enjoyable. I also find Quordle’s word selection to just be harder in general, often utilizing uncommon combinations of letters that aren’t immediately obvious. The combination of these factors along with the nine guess limit gives the process of doing a Quordle a level of tension and excitement that just isn’t really there with the regular version. With the regular Wordle, you kind of know that so long as you’re somewhat serious, you’re probably not going to be in danger of not getting it. On the other hand, I frequently found myself coming down to the wire with Quordle, ending up with more than a handful of incompletes. Actually being in danger of losing makes it all the more sweet when you actually win, and clutch Quordle solves have probably been the reason for the majority of my fist pumping celebrations in recent memory. In that sense, I consider Quordle to be one of the “purest” Wordle variants I’ve played, taking all the aspects of Wordle I enjoy the most and heightening them to new levels. Of course, I guess all of this is to be somewhat expected. 4 > 1 after all!

Rating: greet

Nerdle

Math Wordle - players try to guess a math equation instead of a word. A simple picture might be more informative than me trying to explain how this works, so consult the image below to see how a Nerdle game typically plays out (the teal is the equivalent of green, magenta the equivalent of yellow).

Part of the appeal of Wordle for me is that it is a word based game, which this clearly isn’t. Now, one can argue that in essence both function in the same manner - you guess from a discrete set of possibilities, you get a clue that narrows down the set of possibilities, and you continue in that fashion until you arrive at the final answer. I think the main distinction, however, is that words have a prior distribution in terms of how frequently they are used, while equations don’t really. Part of the fun/frustration with Wordle comes from digging through your vocabulary to find obscure words or words with weird letter combinations to guess. Here, I personally don’t find that same creative process present simply because the idea of a “creative” equation doesn’t really mean anything to me - numbers are just numbers after all. There’s a set of rules to how they interact with each other, and using those rules one can pretty rapidly narrow down the options. That’s just how numbers operate. I find that most of the time I spend on Nerdle ends up being 1. trying to verify that I’m satisfying all the constraints given by the previous clues since there are so many spaces, and 2. actually doing math to see if my proposed solution is indeed valid. I find both these things to be a bit more tedious than actually fun, and the last thing I want from my Wordle-adjacent gaming time is to be doing something more tedious than fun.

Rating: +1 cause the math concept is kinda neat, -4 for everything else

Worldle

Geography Wordle - players try to guess a specific country instead of any random word. After each guess, the game will tell you how far the actual country is and in what direction you need to go to get there. All in all, a pretty simple concept.

Unfortunately, even such a simple concept is too much for my brain to handle as I am simply Not Good at geography. As demonstrated above, most anything on the continent of Africa is a wash. And honestly, the same probably goes for any continent that’s not North America (only three countries to worry about there!) or Australia. However, I feel like this game is honestly not that fun even for people who actually know geography. For starters, the game gives you an outline of the country, and I feel like a lot of people who are good enough to play this game without consulting a map might just be able to tell from the country outline straight up. As a result, I feel like either you’re too dumb to play this game like me, or you’re a geography nerd in which case this game seems like it should be kinda trivial. I imagine the game would probably be more interesting if there was just no country silhouette - wouldn’t really make a difference for people like me, and would actually present a challenge for people who would recognize the countries. When you google Worldle it asks if you meant “Wordle” instead, and if I were you I’d take that as a sign and just leave this game alone.

Rating: Siberia 19287km —> 8%

Crosswordle

Wordle, but in reverse. Instead of players providing guesses and being given clues in return, in Crosswordle players are first given the clues and must instead construct a series of guesses that fit these clues. The game specifies that the guesses must make logical sense, i.e your guesses must make sense when viewed from the lens of actually trying to play the game correctly (no using letters that had previously been eliminated, no reusing of letters that you know are in the wrong spot, etc.)

While the core mechanics of the game are a lot different, I find that Crosswordle operates in fundamentally the same way that regular Wordle does. In both games you're given information and need to come up with words that fit the criteria specified. However, while Wordle gives the player a lot more freedom to choose how they go about solving the world, Crosswordle is more like a puzzle since there are only a handful of solutions for a given Crosswordle board. As such, instead of trying to come up with guesses that eliminate as many possibilities as possible, often times the goal in Crosswordle is to come up with guesses that keep in potential guesses to use down the line. As an example, in Hard mode there are 5 additional guesses you need to fill in, and there also happen to only be five vowels in the alphabet. Finding guesses that don’t eliminate too many vowels at the same time then becomes a crucial part of the game. The challenge that Crosswordle provides is certainly a different flavor from that of Wordle or Quordle, but one that I find really enjoyable all the same. Often times the constraints get really tight really fast, and combing through different possibilities to come up with the right words is both engaging and challenging. Finally coming up with a valid solution is thus immensely satisfying, akin to completing a well written crossword. Guess the name fits pretty well then!

Rating: 5 across

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If any of you have played any variants you enjoyed that I didn’t mention here feel free to shout them out in the comments. If this post gets a thousand likes I’ll post a part 2, so if you want more Wordle content make sure to smash that Like button and join the whatever trevors! Or hmm maybe the supposers is a better name? I don’t know you can pick a name that floats your boat. It’s whatever, I suppose.