Nothing is currently dividing my friends on social media more than the recent online word game, “Wordle.”
Half of people I follow and am social media friends with post their daily scores with glee. The other half post memes about how they don’t care about your Wordle score and how people will do anything everyone else is doing just to fit in.
For those of you who have been living under a rock, (or who cultivated their social media consumption to not see the latest crazes), Wordle is a word game, where the player must guess a five-letter word. Once you enter your first guess, the game lets you know how many letters you’ve guessed correctly and in the correct place, and how many letters you’ve guessed correctly but in the wrong place. The game does this in a way that is reminiscent of the 80’s game “Mastermind,” of which I was a huge fan, by turning the letter blocks green or yellow.
We love word games and crossword puzzles in our house. I have a folder on my phone dedicated to a variety of word games. I love language and words, so word games? They’re my jam. I had a subscription to Games Magazine: World of Games for a few years, as my Dad subscribed when I was a kid, and as soon as it would arrive, Real Man and I would sit down to work on the word games.
So, I play Wordle, every day, along with Real Man and a few of the monkeys. We have a group chat where we send our scores to each other. However, we don’t stop there. Because we also play Dordle, which is Wordle times two. In Dordle, you are guessing two words, in two separate grids, and you just hope that they have letters that are similar between them so you don’t run out of guesses on word two while guessing word one.
But wait! There’s more!
Last night, Real Man texted us all with a link to Quordle. Yep…four words at a time. Amazing.
And, because we also love math, we play Nerdle, and have to correctly guess the game’s equation, including the answer. Then Real Man’s cousin posted on Facebook about Mathler, where they give you a number and you have to guess their equation to get to that number. There’s also Hard Mathler, but for that one you need parentheses, and I’m not playing that game. (Real Man kills it every time)
Those are the ones that the family plays, but when people call it a phenomenon, they aren’t kidding. I wish I had bought stock in “-dle” games at the beginning of all of this because I would be a very wealthy woman today. Or not, considering they are all free.
There is Swiftle, for fans of Taylor Swift, where you have to guess lyrics from her songs. There are also less…respectable versions of the game, which the family and I don’t play (at least not in the group chat).
So, call me a sheep. Call me a follower. It’s okay. I don’t mind. Because the other day I got the Wordle in 2 tries and felt like the Queen of the World-le.
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