Pops Culture

By: Papa Minnow

If you’ve been scrolling through social media over the past month, it’s likely that you’ve come across a 5 x 6 grid of green, yellow, and grey squares, with the title “wordle” at the top and wondered, “what the heck is this?”. The game has become so popular that the New York Times bought the game for a “low seven figure sum.”

For context of it’s virality, the player base at the start of November 2021 was around 90 players. Then at the start of January 2022, the game had garnered 300,000 players. And now, the player base sits at two million players. Impressive.

Wordle Explained

Wordle is a free-to-play online word puzzle game that challenges users to solve the word of the day (wordle) in only six attempts. Each guess must be a proper English word.

Once a player has selected their word and submitted it for entry, a visual flip of tiles will reveal what letters exist or do not exist: grey tiles signify that the letter is not in the word, green tiles reveal the correct letter and position in the word, and yellow tiles express that the letter is in the word, but not the correct position. The virtual keyboard will also grey out any letters that do not exist in the word and have been used.

Each day consists of a different word that is randomly generated, but every player attempts to solve the same word of the day. The game will track your daily scores and your win streaks if you continually guess correctly.

And that’s how the game of Wordle is played. All you need is an internet connection and yourself to start playing today!