Okay, I need to talk about the little green and yellow squares that have basically taken over my Twitter timeline for the past week and a half, because pretending I'm above it at this point would just be lying to you.
Wordle. You've probably seen it already, or you're about to, because it feels like it's added about ten new players an hour since New Year's. If you haven't: it's one five-letter word a day, six guesses, and the tiles go gray, yellow, or green depending on whether a letter's in the word and whether it's in the right spot. That's it. No account, no app to download, no ads shoved in your face between rounds. You get one puzzle, everybody on earth gets the same one, and then you're done till midnight.
I started on January 2nd because my sister sent me a screenshot of her grid with the caption "beat this" and I have never in my life been able to let a challenge like that go unanswered. Streak's at twelve now. I'm oddly proud of a number that means nothing.
A few things I've picked up along the way, since apparently I have opinions about a browser game now:
The starting word debate is dumber than people think it is. Half the internet swears by ADIEU because it front-loads four vowels. I think that's a waste of a guess. Vowels are nice but they don't actually eliminate much. You learn a letter's in the word, sure, but you learn almost nothing about consonants, and consonants are what actually narrow a five-letter word down fast. I open with RAISE most mornings, sometimes CRANE if I'm feeling fancy, and I'd take a guess with two common consonants and two vowels over an all-vowel guess every single time. Fight me about it in the comments, I guess, though I don't think anyone reads the comments on this blog anymore.
Six guesses is exactly the right number, and I will die on this hill. Five would be too stingy — you'd spend the whole game guessing blind and never get the satisfaction of narrowing it down. Eight would remove all the tension; you could brute-force almost anything in eight tries with basic letter frequency. Six makes you actually think about your third and fourth guesses instead of just throwing letters at the wall. Whoever landed on that number (a software engineer, apparently, who built the whole thing for his partner, which is a genuinely sweet origin story if you haven't read about it) got the difficulty curve dead right on the first try, and that almost never happens with a game.
Do not, under any circumstances, tell me the word before I've played. My officemate Dana did this to me on day six — didn't even mean to, just said "man, today's was rough, four vowels in a row" out loud at 8am before I'd had coffee, and that was basically the whole game handed to me. The green-and-yellow grid you post afterward doesn't show letters for exactly this reason, and it's the one piece of design here I think is genuinely clever: you get to brag about your score without ruining anyone else's morning. Most viral internet things don't bother building in that kind of courtesy. This one did, almost by accident I'd guess, and it's a big part of why it's spreading the way it is.
It also helps that this happened during a week where the rest of tech news felt strangely quiet. CES wrapped up last week scaled back and half-empty, a bunch of the usual big names skipped the show floor entirely this year, and there just wasn't a lot of gadget noise to compete with. A free, ad-free, no-login word puzzle landing in that gap, on a week when everyone's stuck inside anyway, is close to perfect timing, whether or not anyone planned it that way.
I don't know how long this lasts before it burns out the way these things always do. Remember when everyone was doing the same jigsaw puzzle app for about three weeks in 2020? But for right now, at 7:15 every morning, coffee first, phone second, it's the best five minutes of my day that involves a screen. Streak's at twelve. Ask me again in a month whether it's still going.