How Nerdle went from Wordle with numbers to a million players in less than a month

metro.co.uk:

Metro.co.uk talks to the creator of Nerdle and discovers how the entire game was designed and created within just a couple of days.

The second Wordle became a hit the rush was on for the less principled corners of the internet to copy it, especially once it was announced that it was being sold to The New York Times for a seven-figure sum.

Not all of the clones are quite so mercenary though and the best of the Wordle wannabes doesn’t currently make any money at all. Nerdle – which you can play for free here – is essentially Wordle with numbers and even though it’s only been running for a few weeks it’s already got more than a million players in over 210 countries.

That means over a thousand people a minute are playing a game that creator Richard Mann and his two teenage children invented in just a few hours.

‘I was driving my daughter home from a hockey match’, Mann told Metro.co.uk. ‘We’d been Wordling and we were chatting about how there must be an equivalent for people that really enjoy maths. We were stuck in traffic on the North Circular and we came up with this idea that why not do an equation?’ Using a very similar interface to Wordle, the idea in Nerdle is that you have to guess an equation in six tries. There are eight squares and one of them has to be an equals sign, and everything to the right of that has to be just a number – not another equation.

You then have to guess what the equation is by typing in numbers and the symbols for add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Just like Wordle, the game will tell you if you’ve got the right number or symbol and if it’s in the right place. It sounds very difficult, but the puzzles are actually easier than they first seem, even if they’re generally a bit harder than the