You might have noticed a grid of colored squares peppered around your social media feeds as of late. Likewise, you might have also seen a strange influx of interest for word games. Though they don’t seem connected, both trends revolve around the sudden astronomical rise of a viral word game called Wordle. If you’ve been wondering about the game yourself, you might hear a lot more about it in the coming months. Taking it from its social media roots, the New York Times has acquired Wordle.

How to play Wordle

So, what exactly is Wordle? The popular word game doesn’t differ a lot from traditional word-guessing games. Every day, players get a five-letter word to guess and six tries to do it. You don’t get any hints as to what the word might be. Instead, the game tells you which letters belong to the word. A yellow square means that the letter is in the word but in the wrong position. Green means it’s the right letter in the right position. Meanwhile, black means that the letter isn’t part of the solution.

Now, you’re likely getting a clearer idea of what those colored squares on Twitter mean. That grid, composed of yellow, green, and black squares, represent the user’s tries. It’s a badge of honor, as if to say, “Yeah, I just took this many tries to guess the word.”

Getting into the game is easy, too. Instead of fancy apps or pay-to-play systems, Wordle is free to play on any browser with this link. It’s a completely web-based game. Besides making it easy for players to get into the game, having a web-based platform means that any Wordle alternatives you might see on the App Store or on the Play Store aren’t part of the authentic Wordle experience. In fact, Apple already started purging any copycats from the App Store in January.

An astronomical rise

Created by software engineer Josh Wardle, the game was originally meant only for his partner, Palak Shah, who loves word games. The Brooklyn-based engineer created the simple game with no need for any account creation. The game doesn’t even have ads.

In fact, the original iteration didn’t even have a way to share your progress on social media. Apparently, Wardle only decided to introduce the feature when a New Zealand player used emojis to represent their progress on the word of the day.

Despite the simplicity of it, Wordle has exploded from its original one-person target audience. Because of good, old-fashioned word-of-mouth, millions of players now post their word grids every single day. And, according to an early interview with The Guardian, Wardle is now challenged to maintain the game’s operation every day.

“It going viral doesn’t feel great to be honest. I feel a sense of responsibility for the players. I feel I really owe it to them to keep things running and make sure everything’s working correctly,” the developer said.

Image source: New York Times

NYT buys Wordle

On Monday, The New York Times purchased the popular word game for “an undisclosed price in the low seven figures,” taking the game off Wardle’s hands. Though the acquisition might seem like a blow to the indie dream, the developer believes that the company are the right stewards for the game, citing that their values follow Wardle’s.

For the Times’ part, acquiring the hit word game can only mean opportunity for the publication’s growing games library. Like any newspaper, the Times maintains a games section to keep everyone’s minds calm amid the growing dread from today’s news. With most publication already in the digital realm, it’s easier to keep a game library. In fact, even before their acquisition of Wordle, the publication already had a similar game called Spelling Bee.

However, despite the acquisition’s promise for both Wardle and the Times, the latter has not explained whether the game will change direction in any way. Though the Times offers some gameplay for free, most are locked behind a subscriber wall.

Certainly, the Times does have a lot of precedent for keeping the games as is. Now, more than a day after the acquisition was made public, Wordle is still the same game as it has always been.

Colored squares will keep littering your feeds for the foreseeable future. Underlying all this talk of acquisition, Wordle offers one of the simplest ways to keep connected over the internet: a daily five-letter word to bond over.

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