Offering one five-letter puzzle per day, it doesn’t sound all that addictive.
Wordle, an online brainteaser that is a puzzle to solve over the holidays has been a surprising hit.
Hundreds of thousands of fans are playing the game – in which the aim is to guess a single five-letter word known as the ‘Wordle’ within six attempts.
The free puzzle – which is very similar to the TV gameshow Lingo – has just one answer each day, meaning everyone is competing at the same challenge.
This game is different than most other online games, such as Fortnite. It aims to keep gamers hooked for long durations of time by offering lots of action with constantly changing challenges.
Instead, Wordle’s simple, once-a-day rule has helped it go viral as many players post their attempts online to see how quickly they were able to find the Wordle compared to fellow competitors.
Hundreds of thousands of fans are playing Wordle – in which the aim is to guess a single five-letter word known as the ‘Wordle’ within six attempts
According to The New York Times, Sunday saw more than 300,000. It has also been discussed hundreds of thousands on Twitter in the last week.
The game’s creator Josh Wardle, a British software engineer, specifically designed there to be only one puzzle per day.
He said he wanted Wordle to feel like a croissant, a ‘delightful snack’ that is not over-used.
‘Enjoyed too often,’ he explained, ‘and they lose their charm.’
Deemed ‘easy to learn but just hard enough’, the game is also described as a cross between Hangman and Mastermind.
Despite launching more than two months ago, Wordle only went viral over Christmas – thanks to a new function which lets players share their attempt at the day’s puzzle.
In 2006, Mr Wardle graduated at Royal Holloway University of London. He then attended the University of Oregon, before joining Reddit, a social media platform.
It is not Mr Wardle’s first viral creation. In 2015, he created Reddit’s The Button, a bizarre game where a button appeared on a website with a 60-second countdown.
Each time that someone presses the button, the clock will reset. However, each person can only click it once. Although there was no reward for pressing it, millions clicked it because of the simple reward of having it press.
Now based in New York, Mr Wardle says he enjoys ‘building unique products that focus on human interaction’.