Probably you have heard about Wordle, the guessing game that gives you a few chances to figure out a mystery five-letter word once a day. Josh Wardle, an artist with web development experience, created the game as a gift to his partner so they could play together during the pandemic.
You might not know that Wordle is a small JavaScript application with a basic structure. There’s an interface used to guess the word, a dictionary of words to be guessed, and code to pick the word to guess and evaluate the user response.
This simple structure has inspired other programmers to create and share their versions of Wordle. It’s easy to find these projects online. If you are really adventurous, you can download a project to try out and then modify the code.
Perhaps most amusing, coders compete to create Wordle in as few lines of code as possible. The GitHub gist linked below includes commentary on one project as people work to reduce the code. If you have a Mac or Unix computer, you can copy the Gist code into a text file, save it with the file name wordle.sh and then use iTerm or other command line interface (CLI) to call this file. It’ll run the game in your CLI. Pay attention to the location of the dictionary file (??/usr/share/dict/words) which has one word per line.
If you only want to play the game, and games like it, definitely check out the Tom’s Guide URL below. More links to projects are in the online version of this article.
Top 23 Wordle Open-Source Projects
Tom’s Guide: Wordle Alternatives
Learnmore
Josh Wordle
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/josh-wardle-wordle-gdc-2022
What is Wordle?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordle
What to know about Wordle
https://www.cnet.com/culture/internet/wordle-what-to-know-about-the-viral-word-game/
What is Wordle and How to Play It?
Meet Worldle Geography Game
Best Games Like Wordle
https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/best-games-like-wordle/
What to Know About Wordle
https://www.today.com/popculture/popculture/wordle-know-popular-online-word-game-rcna11056
