Word play- The New Indian Express

Express News Service

BENGALURU: The year has just begun and we already have an online game that many are hooked on. Called Wordle, the game has currently taken the gaming world by storm. 

Software engineer Josh Wardle created the game for his partner Palak Shah who loves to play word games. It was supposed to be a two-person game before it became an internet sensation. The game has become a worldwide rage, so it’s only obvious that namma ooru will also hop on to the bandwagon. 

Geetanjali Chitnis, head of brand and communications at Geist, starts her day by playing Wordle. She figured out about the game when saw a few people tweet their wordle grid results on Twitter. She says the game is fairly simple and does not consume most of your day.

“It’s something challenging that I can spend a few minutes of my day doing. I love how simple the rules are. What makes it challenging and fun is that everyone who plays the game start with the same blank of 6 x 5-word grid with no clues,” says Chitnis, adding since there’s no app to download, one can just open it up on any browser.

“I try and pick a starting word that has many vowels. I change this up every few days,” she says, revealing her strategy.

Others like Satshya Tharien thinks the share option is a great visual code to share not only the triumph of winning but also the path that one took to win. “It’s a great conversation starter. You can look at someone’s Wordle score and say ‘Oh nice, you got three green squares on your first try – what word did you use?’. It’s also quite simple for anyone who plays the game to understand it and also creates curiosity among those who haven’t played it,” say Tharien, a senior content strategist. 

More than a good vocabulary, one needs patience to play this game. “Wordle has fairly simple five-letter words – you need to be careful about your guesses and be patient enough to deduce your next word,” say Tharien. 

According to her, this game is “a great way to start your day as it helps you slow down, focus and then celebrate the little joy of seeing all the letters turn green when you guess it correctly”.

Agrees Krithika R, a marketing manager, who believes it’s a new-age form of crossword. “Growing up, I have seen my parents solving daily crosswords that come in the newspaper and discuss among themselves. This is similar to that,” she says.

Wordle can be played only once a day and perhaps why people like Sungandhi Gadadhar find it addictive. “You bet it is addictive! I can’t stand it that the next word is 15 hours away, 18 hours away”. But I am also glad it is one word a day – else I would be doing this instead of working,” laughs Gadadhar, a wildlife filmmaker and cameraperson. 

How is the game different from Scrabble?

Scrabble gives you a definite set of 7 letters to choose from, out of which you can make an infinite set of words of varying lengths, based on tiles already present on the board. Wordle starts with all 26 alphabets, but with a 5-letter limit. You only get 6 attempts to guess it. In other words, Scrabble is a game of creation and variations, and Wordle is all about deduction.

How to play the game

A word guessing game, where the website picks a word of the day and the player has six chances to guess the word. The colour of the tiles changes after each guess to show how close a player’s guess was to the word.

For the correct letter, the tile turns green and also indicates it’s in the right position. A yellow tile means the letter is in the answer but not in the right spot, and for incorrect letters, it shows as a grey tile.