By Vikrant Sabharwal
Wordle has been incredibly popular recently. It is a daily word game that is fun, simple and, like a crossword, can only be played once a day. Every 24 hours there's a new word of the day, and it's up to you to figure out what it is. The site itself does a fantastic job of explaining the rules.
Wordle gives players six chances to guess a randomly selected five-letter word. As shown above, if you have the right letter in the right spot, it shows up green. A correct letter in the wrong spot shows up yellow. A letter that isn't in the word in any spot shows up gray. You can enter a total of six words, meaning you can enter five-burner words from which you can learn hints about the letters and their placements. Then you get one chance to put those hints to use. Or you can try for performance and guess the word of the day in three, two, or even one go.
As the game has gotten increasingly popular, a large number of wordle spin-offs have come out. If you are looking for a change, here are some fantastic Worlde alternatives that you can try.
Wordle Spin-Offs
If you’re an NBA enthusiast, Poeltl is for you. Every day you’ll need to guess the identity of a current basketball player based on factors like the team and position they play, their height, ranking, and age. Just as with Wordle, a green box means a perfect match, while a yellow one is only partial. For example, if you get one in the team box, it might mean the player used to play for them but not currently. You get eight tries to guess, and if you grow impatient, you can activate silhouette mode and let the player’s shadow help you win.
Queerdle is like Wordle in almost every way, but with a perfect camp twist. The words are all from gay culture – and vary from the usual five letter words to varying amounts. Players can also submit words to be added to the canon for approval.
You get six tries to guess a song by a popularly streamed artist—the first one is the first second of the song, the second is the following two seconds, and so on. Guess the song and you win. Simple as that.
Similar to Poeltl, Worldle asks you to guess the name of a country or territory based on its silhouette. With every try, the game will tell you how far you are from the mystery country (in kilometers, not miles, sorry), and where your answer is in relation to it. As you play, you’ll be able to recognize big countries by their characteristic shapes, but sometimes, you’ll see the silhouette of a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic whose name you’ve never seen in your life. This is a fun game because if you fail to guess, you still win the chance to learn—Worldle will give you the answer and a Google Maps link that will tell you exactly where the mystery territory is so you can explore the world from the comfort of your screen.
For all intents and purposes, this is a Wordle where the answers are all words related to Taylor Swift. What makes this game hard is that the solution can be literally anything—from words in her lyrics to generic words related to the music industry such as “album.” To make matters worse, it also uses proper nouns. Honestly, it’s a way better idea to subtract yourself from this narrative.
Just like with Taylordle, the answer to this daily game can be anything linked to the Star Wars universe, including proper nouns like droid names. This means you may have to guess numbers and dashes.
If you like birds, you’ll like BRDL. It’s Wordle but using only the names of birds as possible solutions. Of course, this game comes with the drawback that the word list it uses doesn’t have a fixed length, so sometimes you’ll have to provide four-letter words, while other times you’ll need to think of longer ones.
Semantle is not about the spelling of a word but about its meaning. Here, you’ll need to find a word by finding others that mean something similar. The closer to a synonym you are, the higher your score. You also don’t have a set limit of tries, so you can basically play this game all day, every day.
Described by one PopSci staff member as “evil,” Absurdle is the Wordle spin-off that wakes up every day and chooses violence. Even the Absurdle website has a hard time explaining the game, but in short, it’s a version of Wordle that aims to prolong the game as much as possible, throwing you off with every try. Honestly, we don’t know why you’d want to do this to yourself, but here you go.
Better brush up on your J.R.R. Tolkien before playing this one. Just like Wordle, Lordle of the Rings is a five-word guessing game that’s exclusive to “the main text of ‘Lord of the Rings.’ So mythical names, places, and terms such as “Frodo,” “Bilbo,” “Rohan,” “Balrog,” “shire,” “Arwen,” “Gimli,” “Merry,” “dwarf,” and “troll” are all fair game.
The creator of this game basically said ‘give me Wordle, but make it four.’ Quordle is the same concept as Wordle, but there are instead four, five-letter puzzles to simultaneously solve in nine total guesses or less. What also makes the currently trending Quordle different is that it offers a practice mode for users to play in between rounds rather than having to wait another day for more.
Choir music lovers, here’s your chance to shout “hallelujah!” But you still can’t spell it in Byrdle, a five-letter renaissance music “parody” of Wordle. Named for 16th-century English composer William Byrd, only words like “psalm” and “quire” are accepted in the self-confessed sarcastic spinoff that’s drawn a vocational following. Answers may include proper nouns, plurals and musical terms in languages other than English, the game notes.