For several days, if you go through social networks, you have most likely seen users posting tweets and Facebook or Instagram states with the word Wordle and a series of white, yellow and green cube emojis. These are the results of his daily game of Wordle, a word game available to play online, free and without ads, which may become the next big routine for many Internet users.
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What is Wordle?
The Wordle game is a game, or rather a pastime related to crossword puzzles, word searches and sudoku puzzles that usually appear in the daily newspapers as entertainment for a few minutes. The idea of the game is very similar to the game Master Mind, in which we must guess a composition of colored tiles and we must place tiles after which the machine tells us if they are in the correct position, if it appears in the solution, but they are not in the correct position or if they are not in the final solution.
In this case we must guess a specific word that appears in the dictionary, using letters instead of colored tiles. In general, the letters are not repeated and in each of the six attempts that the game gives us, we must put a correct word. It's that simple: we have to guess a word and the game gives us a clue about the positions of the letters.
How Wordle works
One of the features of this trendy online pastime is that it only allows you to play once a day . The web version uses cookies to keep a record, meaning you only have one chance each day to try and guess the word. This forces you to take it seriously in order to get a good result and show off to your social media contacts.
The fact that at the end of the game it offers us the option of copying our result and the emojis with our daily progress to the clipboard of our mobile or computer, makes people dare to show off and share it. All users face the same challenge every day, making it possible to compare results with your friends and acquaintances.
Does Word reward you for lexical knowledge or logic?
At the start of the game, one might think that vocabulary knowledge and knowing a lot of words are rewarded. But the reality is that it's similar to Scrabble, the classic board game of building words like a crossword puzzle, from which Wordle may have drawn inspiration. Initially, it seems to reward knowing many words. But in reality, as has been shown in championships and tournaments, Scrabble rewards using long words with more advantageous letters more than knowing the meaning of words.
Is it possible to win at Scrabble just by knowing how to spell words? Absolutely. Take the case of New Zealand professional Scrabble player Nigel Richards, who won the French national Scrabble championship in 2015. But Richards didn't even know how to order food in French. His strategy for winning a tournament in a language he didn't know was to memorize the official French Scrabble dictionary over a period of seven weeks. This strategy demonstrates that word-building games don't directly reward word knowledge , but rather the ability to optimize tile placement, since the Scrabble board itself rewards individual letters and words with different multipliers.
How does this apply to Wordle? That logic can beat the lexicon. Little by little, strategies are being generated to optimize the metagame, such as putting valid words that allow letters to be discarded or confirmed more or less used in the first turns. Hence one can use word-matching logic to more efficiently guess the word of the day. Wordle gives us a guide to the correct letters and if their position is correct or not, and except in the case of repeated letters, the correct words are reduced as we are discarding letters that are not in the target word.
Wordle in different languages
Now that you've arrived here, do you want to play? The game was born in English, and Wordle can be played for free, legally and without ads from its official website. If English is not your native language, you may be facing a problem of not being able to visualize and know random English words because you are translating from your native language to English. The creator of this phenomenon has confirmed that he will never add ads or payment options to the game, which is simply a daily pastime that many will make their routine either when they travel by public transport or when they have a few minutes free. Since it is only a website and can be accessed from your mobile, you can save it in Bookmarks and access it every day from anywhere.
Fortunately for Spanish-speaking users, there's a Spanish version of Wordle , which eliminates the need to translate into a language other than your native tongue. It works exactly the same, without ads or subscriptions. Wordle is so popular and easy to use that there are even options in different regional languages.
For example, we have a Galician version adapted by Abraham Martinez Gracia, and a Catalan version . The speed with which it has been adapted to other languages demonstrates how simple and accessible this game is. You just need to access a website and start playing.
wordle board game
Given the popularity of Wordle, he graduated to create a board game that takes its mechanics. The result was Wordle: The Board Game, which mimics its mechanics. One player must think of a word, and evaluate the other players' word attempts, in the same way that the Original Wordle does.
The game uses semi-transparent colored tiles and dry-erase markers (or dry-erase markers, depending on what you call them). It has its own page on BoardGameGeek , where hardcore board gamers have described it as very simple and even cumbersome, but fun to play at social gatherings with people who aren't particularly into board games.