A word game app that took off online was made by a British software engineer for his partner.
Josh Wardle, who graduated from Royal Holloway University of London in 2006, created the app to play with his partner Palak Shah over the pandemic as he knew she loved word games.
This weekend the number of players surpassed 300,000 after only having 90 people play the game on November 1.
The app limits players to one daily challenge where you have six attempts to guess the secret word – known as the “Wordle”.
With each guess the player is told whether any of the letters in your prediction are in the answer.
How to play Wordle
Wordle is available to play online everyday on a custom built site. It’s a very simple interface with users getting six guesses to try to crack the code and guess what the word – or Wordle – of the day is.
On the rising popularity of the game, Mr Wardle told The New York Times: “I think people kind of appreciate that there’s this thing online that’s just fun. It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs. It’s just a game that’s fun.
“It’s something that encourages you to spend three minutes a day that’s it. Like, it doesn’t want any more of your time than that.”
Who created Wordle?
As mentioned above, the game was created by British software engineer Josh Wardle, who now lives in Brooklyn and has previously created such hit games at The Button and Place. Part of the joy of Wordle might be that it’s only available once per day and so doesn’t take up too much of your time like other games designed for the internet to try to get you hooked.
However, that hasn’t stopped other engineers getting involved, with Katherine Peterson sharing an expanded version of the game that allows players to tackle an unlimited amount of words on Twitter. When sharing the expanded version, Peterson said: “My brother’s been playing Wordle every day, and he asked me to build him a version that he could play more than once a day.”
