What in the Wordle? 5-letter word challenge game craze goes global

tech.hindustantimes.com:

5 letters, 6 attempts, and just 1 puzzle to solve per day: the "Wordle" formula couldn't be simpler, but in a matter of weeks the online brain teaser has got millions guessing around the world. "It just grabs you," daily player Susan Drubin told AFP of the code-breaking word challenge -- perhaps best described as a cross between the retro board game "Mastermind" and a daily crossword.

"The great thing about it, is it only takes a few minutes, usually, and it's a very nice, tiny distraction," said the 65-year-old from the Washington suburbs.

Wordle puzzle's rise has been meteoric: according to The New York Times, 90 people played on November 1. Two months later, on January 2, more than 300,000 tackled the challenge. The Guardian put the daily player count last weekend at two million, and rising...

Wordle's rules are disarmingly simple: find the word of the day in six tries or fewer. Each guess must be a valid five letter word: letters in the correct space turn green, while letters that are part of the answer but in the wrong spot turn yellow.

Only one word is offered up per day, and it is the same for everyone. Can't crack today's puzzle? You'll just have to wait until tomorrow for the next one.

Although the game itself is accessed on a website, rather than an app, players can generate a shareable widget, with six lines of colored squares indicating how many tries it took to solve the riddle -- without giving away the day's answer, of course.

After a couple of weeks, Drubin -- like legions of players -- took to sharing her results on social media under the hashtag #Wordle.

And thus, a viral phenomenon was born.

Part of what makes Wordle special is that it costs nothing to play -- and is also, more unusually, ad-free.

Its designer