Find Wordle too easy? Try four words at once
If you’re on the internet, you’ve definitely heard of Wordle, the daily word game where users have six attempts to guess a five-letter word. But have you heard of Quordle, the game’s bigger, and arguably more stressful, dupe?
If not, your morning coffee break may be extended (again) while you puzzle your way through Quordle’s game board, which features four five-letter words that users have nine chances to guess, altogether.
“You wanna see who’s bad? Solve FOUR wordles simultaneously. #Quordle is my new jawn,” American musician Quest Love wrote on Twitter.
It’s a game that has “cursed” the world, creator Freddie Meyer says as players flex their brain muscles to complete the puzzle. But how exactly did we get from Wordle to Quordle?
Through a web of copycat games ending in “dle.”
Wordle has become a fixture in the lives of millions almost overnight. The word game, created by Brooklyn-based software engineer Josh Wardle as a gift for his partner, was fairly obscure when it was launched in October. Now, it’s one of the most popular games of the day, and was recently bought by the New York Times for a sum “in the low seven figures.”
The game is simple: all players have to guess the same five-letter word in six attempts. After each guess, the tiles turn grey to show which letters are not in the word, yellow for which letters are in the word but in the wrong position, and green for which letters are in the correct space. Players have one day to solve the puzzle before the game resets with a new word.
It quickly went viral, with users sharing their Wordle results and thoughts on Twitter and other social media platforms. For example, you’ll often see Canadian players commiserating over the sneaky American spelling of words (like Wordle #207, which used the spelling “favor” instead of “favour”) that caused them to lose the game.
The puzzle has also become a fixture in people’s lives as the pandemic hits a third calendar year.
And the popularity of the game isn’t going unnoticed by nifty coders looking to make the game edgier.
In fact, Meyer said Quordle found its beginnings when he and a group friends began playing Dordle, another Wordle dupe that features two words for players to guess in seven tries created by Guilherme S. Töws, at the end of January 2022, according to Quordle’s website.
Meyer said he found the game more difficult than Wordle and it was “a blast to play,” but was still able to guess both words in seven attempts. The challenge, it seems, wasn’t challenging enough.
So, to make a win even more difficult, Meyer and David Mah created a Quordle prototype and shared it with their Dordle group chat.
“It was truly horrific code, but I knew that I had to continue the madness,” Meyer wrote.
At first, Meyer said there were a few dozen players, but when the game was featured in an article in The Guardian about Wordle alternatives, “things quickly exploded.”
The game now has over 300,000 daily Quordlers, with over 850,000 total players.
You wanna see who’s bad? Solve FOUR wordles simultaneously. #Quordle is my new jawn.
MUSICIAN QUEST LOVE ON TWITTER