Wordle

History

The game was originally developed by Welsh Software Engineer Josh Wardle for play with his friend Palak Shah to play during their freetime. After its acquisition by the New York Times for sums of around a million USD, the game exploded in popularity in 2022, and became the new trend of the year.

Gameplay

Wordle starts out with a pre-generated five-letter word that the player tries to guess using the 26-letter English alphabet. The player is given six tries to guess the word. With each guess, the user is told whether or not each letter is in the word as well as if the letter is placed in the correct location. You can only play once per day.

Variations

Many different variations of Wordle have popped up such as Wordle unlimited and Absurdle. Wordle Unlimited is no different from Wordle except you can play multiple times per day. Absurdle is a lot like Wordle except the five-letter word can change based on previous hints essentially cheating you out of the game.

Strategies

The strategy is typically to start with a word that begins with the most used letters, and slowly eliminate letters and possible words as you go. As can be seen in the Wordle source code, there are around 12000 possible words. Using intuition, your task is to eliminate as many possible words as possible to get the correct word. One way to do this is to make a WordleBot using code. Another way is to devise a strategical manner of guessing words.