Wordle's legacy
I believe the success of Wordle represents a revolution in popular mobile game design. The simple yet infectious game developed by Josh Wardle has become a blueprint for developers of similarly designed puzzle games like Quordle and Heardle. These pivots have thrived based on the inventiveness of their relation to the original Wordle. For example, Quordle is basically the same game as Wordle except it incorporates four simultaneous puzzles instead of just one, and Heardle’s twist is that players guess songs instead of words. However, Wordle’s breakthrough indicates a much greater opportunity than some tangential clones for which the greatest requirement is a title that rhymes with the word “wordle”.
(Author’s Note: I’m currently developing a game named “Curdle”. Players view an image of milk each day and guess how long it’s been sitting outside for.)
The purpose of this article is to imagine the greater possibility space of mass-appeal social gaming beyond Wordle, and also to empower creators to develop their own unique and compelling “once-a-day” games. Now is the perfect time to do so because the Wordle wave has trained and primed millions of casual gamers for the next web-based once-a-day gaming trend. They aren’t even expecting a polished or complex product, and competitors are limited, so the time to innovate is now!
Whereas games like Quordle and Heardle are short-term fascinations, Wordle seems like a game that could stick around for a long time. It feels somehow fundamental in the same way that classics like Crossword Puzzles and Sudoku do. Its rules and subject matter, along with the overall effect Wordle has on players, give it this hard-to-pin-down attribute of being “essential.” Regardless of whether this is
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