Tag Archives: Wordle

Technology

Wordle copycat creator apologizes for ripping off the popular free word game

Leave a comment

Developer Zach Shakked — the creator of one of several controversial copycat versions of Josh Wardle’s popular free word-guessing game — has responded to Apple removing his app from the App Store after an internet backlash that followed his boasting about the money-making potential of his clone.

“I realize I crossed a line. And I surely, surely will never do anything remotely close to this again. I fucked up,” tweeted Shakked. He goes on to explain that “Wordle” itself wasn’t trademarked and that Wardle’s game was similar to Lingo, an older TV game show with a similar word-guessing mechanic. Shakked also says that he planned to expand on Wordle with more functionality and change the overall design of the app to less resemble Wardle’s own game, had he been able to before Apple removed his app from the store.

Wordle has skyrocketed to popularity over the past several weeks, with its minimalist design, bite-sized daily puzzles, and the now-iconic grids of grey, yellow, and green squares. The original game is completely free and solely played through a web browser, leaving an opportunity for any number of copycats to try and make a quick buck off the concept on the App Store.

Shakked’s clone (called “Wordle – The App”) was one of the more high-profile copies, thanks to the developer’s celebratory tweets about the project and the eyebrow-raising price tag — an optional $30-per-year annual subscription that would allow players to play an unlimited number of puzzles, instead of Wordle’s one-per-day system. Shakked’s tweets also rubbed many the wrong way, boasting about how many downloads and subscription trials his app was getting and how it was “going to the fucking moon.”

Shortly after reports of Wordle knockoffs broke, Apple leapt into action, removing the offending apps from the App Store last night. Currently, there are only two puzzle games called “Wordle” left on Apple’s storefront, both of which offer very different types of word games than Wardle’s viral hit and which predate the web app by a number of years. (Incidentally, the other Wordles appear to be greatly benefiting from Wardle’s game’s success, with both apps rocketing up the App Store charts).

In a separate thread, Shakked also says that he spoke to Wardle and offered to license the idea, work together to develop an official app, or pay him a percentage of any profit, which Wardle reportedly declined. Shakked also claims that he told Wardle that he would “consider changing the name” before the app was removed entirely.

Wardle, for what it’s worth, has already been extremely clear about the idea of monetizing Wordle (which, as he explained in a New York Times interview, was originally created as a gift for his partner). “I think people kind of appreciate that there’s this thing online that’s just fun,” Wardle said. “It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs. It’s just a game that’s fun.”

The aftermath of the blowback seems to have soured Shakked (who had previously complained on Twitter about how “[s]hameless copy/pasting ideas/features will get you nowhere”) on the idea of copycat apps in the future. “I’ll go back to creating apps based on my completely, evergreen, original ideas and never fuck with anything remotely like this again,” Shakked’s thread concludes.

Zach Shakked did not respond to request for comment.



Read original article here

Technology

The Wordle clones have disappeared from the App Store

Leave a comment

Has Apple taken action against apps that cloned the popular web game Wordle? They have now disappeared from the App Store, after several publications (including The Verge) called out a flood of copycats so blatant as to be named “Wordle” and that featured the same gameplay and UI, each taking advantage of the fact that developer Josh Wardle didn’t create an Apple app of his own. While we’re still seeing a few clones on the App Store, they don’t use the Wordle name.

The clone apps had a spotlight shone on them today, when one developer started bragging about how many downloads his version of Wordle was getting. Following some intense backlash from the community, he set his account to private, but people had already started finding many other apps like it on the App Store.

The search results for Wordle at 5PM ET today, showing two clones.

The search results for Wordle at 8:08PM ET — the first results are now an app from five years ago, and a story about Words With Friends 2.

Apple didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for confirmation that it was the one that took action against the Wordle-alikes, but it seems vanishingly unlikely that each developer decided to take down their app in the space of about an hour. If Apple really is initiating a crackdown on the apps, it’s tipping the scales significantly to protect the original game.

While there have been similar high-profile situations in the past — as Protocol points out, Flappy Bird and Threes vs 2048 come to mind — it’s hard to think of a recent example where Apple stepped in as heavily as it seems to have done today. Apple does have language about copycats in its developer guidelines, but it’s notably vague: “Come up with your own ideas,” section 4.1 reads. “Don’t simply copy the latest popular app on the App Store, or make some minor changes to another app’s name or UI and pass it off as your own.”

There have been questions about how Apple would deal with blatant clones, as it’s seemingly let things slide in some instances. With disappearance of the Wordle-alikes from the App Store, we may have gotten a precedent for how similar is too similar.

Read original article here

Entertainment

Wordle isn’t actually about the words

Leave a comment

Wordle (I was so damn close to getting this in 3)
Screenshot: Wordle

The annoying thing about anything going viral online these days—in this case, the Twitter-friendly word game Wordle—is that all the fun metaphors have gotten a little grim. You can’t talk about Josh Wardle’s hyper-shareable web game “sweeping the nation,” or people “catching the Wordle bug,” anymore, because… well.

Even so: A lot of people have been playing and sharing Wordle lately, in a way that in no way invokes any other things people have been indiscriminately sharing with each other of late. And it is, in fact, the rapid transmissibility of Wardle’s game that’s made it novel.

That’s not a knock on the game’s actual mechanics—which see you play a daily bout of Mastermind with a five-letter mystery word, using hints about your previous guesses to narrow down the search. Unlike many things associated with Chuck Woolery, the core gameplay of Wordle (derived from games that date back to nearly a century of code-breaking quizzing) has aged surprisingly well.

But it’s also not why Wardle’s game has taken off, and suddenly begun clogging your Twitter feed with all those little green and yellow boxes. Instead, Wordle has parasitically latched onto people’s brains—that one’s not depressingly reflective of reality just yet, right?—by lifting an element from another classic word game: the daily crossword.

Outside the genuine thrills of a well-crafted puzzle, the appeal of the crossword is obvious: Everybody gets the same one, and they only get one a day. The end result is a communal experience with a healthy underpinning of smug competition, one that Wordle ably replicates. It’s not for nothing that the game only took off for real in December, when Wardle implemented an easy way to allow players to show their daily attempt on Twitter.

G/O Media may get a commission

Adaptive EQ automatically tunes music to your ears.
Active Noise Cancellation blocks outside noise, so you can immerse yourself in music.

Those little graphs of green and yellow boxes are about more than bragging, too—although that’s definitely in there. They’re also an invocation of shared struggles, as you look at someone else’s grid and see that they also got fucked over by a surprise double-letter lurking in a recent puzzle.

What’s especially interesting about this is that it helps highlight what Wordle isn’t about, which is words. Yes, your vocabulary constrains the possibility space of the letters you input, and you have to at least have some grasp of English to find the proper solutions. But successful Wordle play is much more about figuring out how to game the solution algorithm. (Personally, I always start with “orate,” since it gives me data on three of the five vowels; I’m sure there are infinitely better strategies out there waiting in the weeds.) It’s similar to the way that Scrabble tests, not for vocabulary or literacy per se, but for memorization of a vast and specific set of letter sequences. (See also: Babble Royale, the other big recent revolution in online word games, which marries battle royale elimination mechanics to Scrabble to make a game that’s the tense, frenetic opposite of Wordle’s quiet simplicity.)

The real question, of course, is: Can Wordle last, or is this just another easily shared, easily disposed online fad? That core simplicity is a double-edged sword; on the one hand, every game is a low investment of time and energy, making it an easy inclusion in daily routine and habit. On the other hand, nobody loves playing a solved game, and the longer people have to learn the system’s quirks, the more likely it’s going to get reduced to a game of Tic-Tac-Toe with 24 extra letters to use.

For now, though, it’s shockingly nice to have a communal experience that doesn’t involve screaming at people on Twitter or, uh, dying. Here’s hoping it can hold out at least a few more weeks. (Or until my streak breaks, in which case, I’m out!)

Read original article here

Entertainment

How to Master (or Cheat at) Wordle, the Internet’s Favorite Word Game of 2022

Leave a comment

Screenshot: Khamosh Pathak

The internet loves two things: A fresh trend, and word games. Wordle is both, and even has a love story in the mix. On Sunday, the second day of 2022, the online word game went viral and was played by more than 300,000 people.

It started out as a word guessing game created by Jost Wardle, a software engineer based in Brooklyn, for his partner who loves word games. Since then, you’ve likely seen people tweeting blocks of grey, green, and yellow. If you waant to be a part of the fun, here’s how Wordle works.

How to play (and share) Wordle

Wordle is a once-a-day puzzle game that lives on a simple, ad-free website. It starts you off with six blank rows of five boxes each. The game doesn’t give you any letters to start off with, and your goal is to completely guess the word before your six guesses are up.

After you guess a word (and it has to be a real word, not random letters), the letters will turn into either grey, yellow, or green.

  • Grey means that the letter is not in the word at all.
  • Yellow means the letter is in the word, just not where you guessed it.
  • Green means that the letter is in the exact place where you guessed it.

Once you understand the rules, it’s simply a game of elimination. Start off with a word, and just see if you can get yellow or green tiles (if you’re new to word games, we’ve got a hack for you below).

Screenshot: Khamosh Pathak

Once you’ve guessed the word, you’ll see a popup with your streak, scores, and a countdown for the next Wordle. You can click “Share” to copy your score in visual emojis, paste it in a tweet, and send it along. Then you’re addicted and come back to try it out each day.

Screenshot: Khamosh Pathak

How to master Wordle, even if you suck at word games

If, like me, you suck at word games, here’s some good news: Wordle has quite a range. Word game lovers can get competitive with it, but if you’re a beginner, there are a couple of tricks you can use to guess the word correctly by the third or fourth try.

The great thing here is that you’re limited to only guessing five-letter words, so your best strategy is to guess words using the most common letters in the English alphabet. Try words that include the letters e, t, a, i, o, n, s, h, and r. And, most commonly, words start with the letters t, a, o, d, and w.

Here are some suggestions for words you should start out with: siren, octal, abuse, and so on. Here’s a list of the world’s most common five-letter words.

After your first or second try with this, you’ll probably get two or three yellow or green tries. You’ll also know which letters not to include.

Then you can start off the elimination process on your own. You can obviously use Google (for my puzzle, I searched “five-letter words containing ‘nal’,” or you can rely on a wonderful site like Word Hippo.

Screenshot: Khamosh Pathak

Here, you can filter words that contain certain letters, and you can even use the advanced filters to define letters in the beginning, middle, or end of the words. Using this list, you’ll find the right word in no time. Once you do it a couple of times, you’ll have the confidence to solve Wordle without any help.

 

Read original article here

Entertainment

How to Cheat at ‘Wordle’

Leave a comment

In these frigid, fraught days of early 2022, a singular bright spot has emerged: Wordle. The simple online game, in which you have six chances to guess a 5-letter word, has exploded in popularity in recent months, helped along this week by a sparkly story in the New York Times.

Its viral load was juiced by the fact that the game makes it easy to copy your score for sharing on social media. Doing so looks like this:

By Tuesday morning, when everyone had emerged from their Omicron-filled holiday holes, my Twitter timeline was slathered in tweets like that one. And I get it—it’s a fun game! And here I am, about to ruin it for everyone.

Where to Play Wordle

On the Wordle website. (It’s not an app.)

How Wordle Works

So, the instructions for the game appear when you first load it, so you don’t really need to read this bit. But for those who, like me, see instructions and immediately ignore them then go back and read them after you fail, here’s the gist.

You guess a 5-letter word—it can be any word—in the hopes of guessing the correct word that day. The letters that don’t appear in the correct word will be highlighted in black, letters that are present in the word of the day but not in the right spot are in yellow, and the letters that meet all the correct criteria are in green.

How you proceed from here is up to you, but a basic strategy is to look at the letters you got right and then put them in a logical order for common words. You want to make sure you are only selecting words that exclude the letters that you already know aren’t in there based on your first guess. You just keep doing that until you get it right or run out of tries.

The catch is, you can only play Wordle once every 12 hours, which is how I discovered how to cheat the system and win on the first try.

Wordle’s Fatal Flaw

Spoilers follow. Stop reading now if you don’t want ruined fun.

Here’s the thing I don’t know that many players—or at least new players—have realized: The correct word each day is apparently the same for everyone. (This is based on people tweeting out the word and me asking everyone I know who’s played it what they had for today’s word.) Spoiler: For Wednesday, Jan. 5, it’s “tiger.”

Because of this, there are two ways to cheat: The boring way and the fun way.

The Boring Way to Cheat at Wordle

The boring way is to simply search for “wordle” on Twitter and see what people are saying, and eventually, you’ll find some party-pooper like me tweet out “siege” or whatever the Wordle word of the day is. Just use that as your first guess and bang, 1/6 score. Tweet that shit out and show the world just how shady smart you are.

The Fun Way to Cheat at Wordle

Okay, so I’m overselling this because this isn’t really much better than the boring way, but it at least seems more clever—and has the added bonus of allowing you to play the game more than once every 12 hours. It’s also the way I discovered this afternoon just how easy it is to cheat at Wordle.

Simply refreshing the URL for Wordle won’t let you start a new game. To do that, you need to open a new browser window in incognito mode, which will let you start a new game. If you still get 6/6, just close the private browser window and open a new one. Once you figured out the word for that day, just do this one final time, enter the correct word on the first try, and there ya go, you’re a flipping “genius” as the game declares.

The More Fun Way to Play Wordle and Not Be a Scumbag at the Same Time!

Okay, so just because it’s stupidly easy to cheat at Wordle doesn’t mean you should—honestly, just writing this has bummed me out, and actually playing the game is way more fun.

I’m sure people far smarter than I have better strategies, but here’s how I play. For my first guess, I pick a word with a bunch of vowels, like “adieu.” (Your guess has to be a word.) That will give you a good first start, and (with a lot of dumb luck) is how I managed to get a 2/6 score once. Next, pick a word with a lot of common consonants (I go for one with the letters “o” or “y” as well, since those aren’t in “adieu”) such as “stick,” “stork,” or “story.” After that, it’s just a matter of making a great guess based on the letters you know are in the word while excluding words with the ones you know aren’t.

Anyway, if you’re mad that I ruined Wordle, just remember, none of us will remember this game in two weeks, so I hope you’ll have it in your heart to forgive me.

Read original article here

Technology

Wordle: What is it and why is everyone tweeting about it?

Leave a comment

A puzzle from a few days ago (so it’s not a spoiler!)


Power Language

If your Twitter feed is anything like mine, you’ll have noticed something a little weird. Tweets with boxes. Yellow boxes, green boxes, grey boxes…

They look a little something like this:

Yes, that is my tweet. Yes, I have become a Wordle guy.

So what the hell is Wordle? Good question.

What is Wordle?

Wordle is a daily word game you can find online here. It’s fun, simple and — perhaps crucially — can be played only once a day.

I could try to explain the rules, but the site itself does a fantastic job of explaining the rules.

This game is so good.


Wordle

Essentially a word game, Wordle gives players six chances to guess a random five letter word. As shown above, if you have the right letter in the right spot, it shows up green. A correct letter in the wrong spot shows up yellow. A letter that isn’t in the word in any spot shows up grey.

Simple right? Yes, simple but also incredibly compelling.

So it’s just a word game? Big deal…

Yeah it’s just a word game, but there are a few tiny little details that have resulted in everyone going absolutely bonkers for it.

There’s only one puzzle per day. 

This creates a certain level of stakes. You only get one shot at the Wordle. If you mess up, you have to wait until tomorrow to get a brand new puzzle. 

Everyone is playing the exact same puzzle! 

This is crucial, as it makes it easier to ping your buddy and chat about the day’s puzzle. “Today’s was tough!” “How did you get on?” “Did you get it?”

Which takes us to the next point…

It’s easy to share your results!

Once you’ve successfully or unsuccessfully done the puzzle for the day, you’re invited to share your Wordle journey for the day. If you tweet the image, it looks like this…

Note that the word and letters you chose are obscured. All that’s shown is your journey toward the word in a series of yellow, green and grey boxes.

It’s very compelling. If you get it easily, maybe in the second or third try, there’s a showoff element whereby you must show your followers how smart you are and share.

If you get it by the skin of your teeth in the sixth go, that’s also a cool story. But most importantly, the puzzle itself isn’t spoiled. 

So Wordle isn’t just a word game, it’s a conversation starter and a chance to show off on social media. That’s why it’s going so viral. 

Who made Wordle?

Wordle is the work of Josh Wardle. Extremely online people may remember him as the creator of Place, an utterly wild collaborative art project/social experiment that sent the internet into a tizzy in April 2017.

Place was a shared online space that allowed literally anyone to fight over what was drawn there. It resulted in huge, sprawling communities battling over space on this gigantic online canvas. 

It ultimately ended up looking like this: 

Remember place? That was a wild time.


Reddit

Wordle was mentioned in the New York Times in November but really got traction when the share element was added on Friday.

In a Reddit post, Wardle said he wanted Wordle to feel like a croissant, a “delightful snack” that is enjoyed occasionally. This is explicitly why there’s only one puzzle per day. “Enjoyed too often,” he explained, “and they lose their charm.” 

Agreed. 



Read original article here