If you’ve been on any social media platform in the past two weeks, you’ve probably seen a grid of green, yellow and black squares. This is the latest pandemic phenomenon called Wordle – a free online game that gives users a new word puzzle each day. It was created by Josh Wardle for his crossword-loving partner. As of January 10, the game has 2.7 million players.
In Wordle, players have six tries to guess a target five-letter word. Every time they make a guess, they are told which letters in their guess are in the word and in the correct position (green), and which letters are in it but in a different position (yellow). It’s sort of like the boardgame Mastermind but with a key difference. In Mastermind, all six colours were equally likely to appear in the target. In Wordle, because guesses and targets all have to be real words, some letters are more likely to appear, making some guesses better than others.
