For someone who spends his life tapping out thousands of words per day, it’s depressing how bad I have proven to be at smoking them out in Wordle.
Admittedly I’m late to the phenomenon with, according to my stats page, just nine games under my belt with only one sub-four-guess round, but I can’t imagine voluntarily turning up the difficulty. I already spend enough time delaying the start of my work day by staring at the screen in abject bafflement, thank you.
But for anyone routinely completing the game within the first few turns or for those just looking for a new challenge, there’s a new Wordle alternative in town: Quordle.
While Wordle expects you to guess the mystery five-letter word in six attempts, Quordle ups the difficulty by expecting you to sniff out four words at the same time, and with only three more chances to succeed. It's hard enough that you might well need to seek out today's Quordle answers.
The letters behave as they do in Wordle, with green denoting the right letter in the right place, and yellow telling you that the letter is correct but in the wrong location. Like Wordle, there’s one puzzle a day, but it also lets players mess around with a practice mode in between resets.
If you manage to succeed, or just feel like showing the world how dismally you crashed and burned, you can share your color grid on social media — only with Quordle these are too long for copy-and-paste sharing, so it supplies an image instead.
According to the site’s tutorial page, the original concept of Quordle came from engineer David Mah in a “moment of evil and genius.” Wanting to share said evil with the world, designer Freddie Meyer picked up the project and polished it into the “monstrous creation” you can play right now.
“I have no plans to monetize Quordle, I just enjoy watching everyone enjoy this insane game,” Meyer writes. “I am so glad the world has been thoroughly cursed by Quordle and can't wait to see how Quordle strategies evolve!”
If you try Quordle and find it too tough, you can always stick to Wordle. And, no, Wordle has not gotten harder since The New York Times took over, though to many it feels that way.
