#oneaday Day 1079: Wordle

Have you played Wordle? It's the currently fashionable "thing" to be playing, and pleasingly it's not in any way annoying, predatory, monetised or full of advertising. It's just a simple, fun little thing. You can try it out here.

Wordle is a simple word-guessing game in which you have up to 6 guesses to figure out a 5-letter word. After making a guess, you're told, Mastermind-style, whether you have any letters in the right place, or any letters that are correct but in the wrong place. Notably, you're also told which letters are not in the word at all, so this can help inform your subsequent guesses.

It's straightforward, it's enjoyable and it takes a couple of minutes to play — because you can only play one puzzle a day. That's not an arbitrary "Get More Energy!" restriction either — there's simply one puzzle a day that is the same for absolutely everyone who plays. And part of the fun comes from sharing the "grid" pattern of whether or not you solved the puzzle — this shows your sequence of guesses in terms of your "letter in the right place" and "letter in the wrong place" positions, but not what the actual letters were.

This is neat because it's eminently shareable, but it's not thrusting "advertising" in everyone's face. The default "share" button doesn't even give a link to Wordle — it just posts the puzzle number, how many attempts you got it in and your "grid", so if anyone is interested in finding out what Wordle is, they have to do so themselves. That somehow feels less obtrusive than constantly sharing links to the same thing over and over again.

I think the best thing of all, though, as previously mentioned, is that Wordle is clearly just a project the author Josh Wardle (see what he did there) made for a bit of fun, rather than in an attempt to make money or be an advertising platform. There's no monetisation on Wordle at all; it just is. And let me tell you, finding something actually entertaining on the Internet that is completely free of cynical monetisation, predatory practices and otherwise manipulative behaviour is a genuine pleasure these days.

So yeah, Wordle. It's a good.