Fans of the word game Wordle will be excited to learn something new is coming to the game which will change the way the game is played.
Wordle enthusiasts have been playing the game since Josh Wardle invented the game and released it to the world in 2021. The timing of the game's introduction was fortunate as people began warming up to playing games after the covid pandemic shut down a lot of outside activities.
Only a short time after the game was introduced to the world, Hasbro, Inc. (HAS) and the New York Times Games (NYT) are collaborating to bring the next level of Wordle. Those who didn’t jump on the craze, may be asking themselves, wait, what is Wordle, and why is it being reinvented. Wordle is a word game that took players and nonplayers into the daily challenge of solving a puzzle.
Simply put, in Wordle, there is a grid of boxes, and players must guess a word going, with no clues. Just pick a five-letter word. If the letter is in the word and in the right position, the box will turn green. If the letter chosen is in the word, but just in the wrong position the box will turn yellow. If the letter turns the box gray, the letter is not in the word. Players only have 6 attempts to guess each word in each row. If it was too easy, players could just turn on the ‘hard mode.’
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What Made Wordle World Famous?
The whole world is playing the exact same game and quite possibly at the exact same time. The New York Times acquired Wordle from Josh Wardle, the inventor of Wordle, on Jan. 1, 2022. Wardle had grown weary of the attention he had received after the launch of the game in 2021 and he was ready to walk away from the craze and willingly sold the game rights. New York Times was ready to bring Wordle to its app to add to the already popular crossword and spelling bee.
Players had been posting their Wordle scores on their social media accounts, as in how fast they were able to solve the puzzle. Players have six attempts. Understanding the scores took some deciphering. The first number in the posted score is the number of the word puzzle that is solved, the second is how many tries out of the six attempts it took to solve the puzzle. For example, a score of 215 4/6 means this is puzzle number 215 and it took four out of six attempts possible to solve it. Friends, family and total strangers were competing against one another for a few minutes a day giving rise to competition and comradery alike. Not wanting to create spoilers, most people did not post the day’s answer.
Hasbro and the New York Times Reinventing a Craze
During the pandemic families and friends were forced to find other ways to entertain themselves. Many of them found themselves at one another’s houses without restaurants to go to. They dusted off old board games and started to play in person. This was norm for some, but others hadn’t played games in quite some time, if ever.
This new social gaming experiment by Hasbro and New York Times is taking the viral game of Wordle and putting it into a board game, Wordle: The Party Game.
The board game will come with everything you need to play your own competitive game of Wordle with added rules. The Wordle host will have the secret word and other players will have to guess the word. The concept is to have the lowest score possible, meaning the lowest number of attempts to get a word right.
To bring up the level of competitiveness players can incorporate speed into the game, have a limited time available to solve the puzzle, and play as singles or in teams.
