Let’s analyze how a simple internet game become such a hit so little time.
For those of you who live far from social medias, Wordle is a game playable in your navigator where you have to try to guess a word of 5 letters in six tries. The game was made by Josh Wardle. Each guess must be a valid 5 letter word. After each guess, the color of the tiles will change to show how close your guess was to the word. A green tile will means the letter is in the correct spot in the final word. A yellow tile indicates a letter in the final word but placed at a wrong spot. A grey tile means that the letter is not in the final word.
The simple game has recently been heavily discussed everywhere, from Twitter, The New York Times, Hacker News or even Google promoting the game!
Easy to play & fast to explain
Wordle is a game that you can understand and play in less than a minute. It’s how to play section is easy to access and well done, it answers all your questions on a single screen. This is an important factor when you want your game to be played by many people.
Clean from bottom to top
The game user interface is clean polished from all non-necessary elements. It load fast on crap internet with an old computer or mobile. Because yes, the game is also responsive. To play, you don’t need to create an account, disable your ad-blocker, accept cookies or whatever. The web page only load the game you asked your browser to play. Obviously all those factors helped the game to spread and be played by so much.
One Wordle a day
Wordle limit you to only one play a day. While this may see as a limitation at first it’s actually a genius way to keep your player base. Indeed, one of the obvious consequence of this is that user will come back every day to try to solve the daily puzzle. Also, the daily guess is the same for everyone allowing to compare yourself to others. The other less obvious consequence is that thanks to this mechanic the game prevent it’s users to get tired of the game, at the risk of frustrating them from not being able to guess more than one word a day. Those two factors made the Wordle hype last longer than other social media games.
Sharable
I think one of the most important aspect of Wordle in it’s success story is it’s share feature. The share button of Wordle produce a spoiler free, copy & paste ready summary of the results of your daily game. The produced text is only understandable for other Wordle players and as such this raise the curiosity of any one reading the cryptic shared results. Maybe you will not be necessarily hooked after the first tweet. But after seeing those little colored square ten times a day you will want to understand what they means. And ultimately give a try to Wordle and probably fall in love with it.
