WORDLE - Guess the hidden word in 6 tries
Tags: gamedev, app, ux, webapp
Published: 2022-01-05 20:37:57

A free new word game WORDLE is here. It is so simple yet _a little_ challenging. 

Play WORDLE here: https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

I came across ([via NYTimes story](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-game-creator.html)) this word game and found it very interesting. From a developer standpoint, the game user interface and user experience cannot be any better than what this engineer has developed. Wordle was developed by Josh Wardle ([@powerlanguage](https://github.com/powerlanguage)).   


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/u0i90hemtah5qaa60rl0.png)

This game went viral late December 2021 with players reaching about 300,000. As of now (Jan 5, 2022), the number of players may be a lot more as there has been a lot of media coverage.

## Game Highlights

- A new puzzle is available each day. The objective of the game is to guess the 'mystery' word of the day in 6 guesses

- Everyone, _everywhere in the world_ guesses the same word

- you may only complete one puzzle per day; game resets at midnight

- No clues on what the word is. You may start with any 5 letter English word (from the dictionary) and go from there. Looks like Scrabble game word rules apply here.

- Only six chances and then you are out for that day 

- Easily share your results without sharing your results


## Game Mechanics/design Features
 
- the game interface works equally well on any smart phone browser or web browser (no app to download)
- only three colors that indicate status of letters in your word entry:
  - correct letter in a correct position (green)
  - correct letter in a wrong position (orange/yellow)
  - incorrect letter (position does not matter!) (grey)

- whether you get it right or not you cannot play again**. Which means, if you refresh the browser, the game won't let you retry if you already tried for that day. This may seem frustrating but that is what makes this game so interesting. According to its creator, he wants people to spend only a couple of minutes a day and not anything more than that.

- There are 6 rows of 5 cells for 5 letters of each guess. After a guess you can not go back to that row but can keep trying to type different letters (and use backspace) to try another word/guess. 

- A cool feature is that the keyboard letters light up with same colors as green, orange, grey. You can pretty much type any of the 26 letters but this color coding gives you ways to try out or use a guess to weed out some letters with a proper word. This allows one to use letters in their guesses to figure out the correct 'mystery' word. 

- Upon a word guess entry, the letters rotate to reveal the status letter-by-letter. It is so satisfying to see the letters turn green or orange. Of course, when they all turn GREEN then it is a pure joy!
  

- the killer feature is the 'Share' button. It does a simple copying of the game status to a buffer. You may paste to a note pad, twitter, Facebook, etc. and your attempts are not revealed. The engineer/creator calls it 'spoiler free emoji grid' and was inspired by [@irihapeta](https://twitter.com/irihapeta/). 

If you did not play already, go play now.

- https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/


** Of course, you could play again from different browsers, devices, clearing cache etc. But, no matter what, only one word per day for everyone in the world.
 
PS: I looked under the hood and the code is simple, elegant and well written. I would not call it hack proof. But, I leave it at that as I don't want to spoil it for others.