Wordle Mania

Every morning I wake up to the green glow of Wordle squares on my phone. The messages start appearing before I wake up and my alarm goes off at 6:30am. This is what happens when you're in a western time zone and are apparently one of the last to arise. The string of game posts, emojis, and comments greet me like a warm hug every morning. 

I love that we have this little exchange every day! 

It all started right after Christmas. I had heard about Wordle from a friend and invited my family to try it. We all love games. My dad is a crossword puzzle fanatic. And we are all just a teeny bit competitive when it comes to games. 

If you've never heard of Wordle it's basically a simple word game where you have 6 tries to guess a 5 letter word. It was started by Josh Wardle in the fall of 2021 as a game he created for himself and his friends. It grew like crazy almost overnight. Then the New York Times bought it for 6 figures in February 2022. (Way to go, Josh!) You can check it out here.

After we got everyone in the family to understand the game and how to play we all started posting our results. The "family" includes my husband, my sister, my two brothers, brother-in-law, niece, nephew, my daughter, and my parents. The age range is 19 to 91. 

Part of the game is to post your results. We had a couple of group texts and ended up renaming one WORDLE MANIA so we all knew which one to post our results to. We don't need to mix up Wordle stats with recipe recommendations, soccer stats, and birthday celebrations. This is serious business. haha.

It's now become a daily habit and competition to see who can solve it in the fewest tries. Since I'm not the first, I take my time in the morning. Get my coffee, my cereal and watch the Today Show while I solve the puzzle. And there is absolutely no cheating. Duh. You just don't. Cuz what fun is that? 

If you don't solve it it's a bleak morning. And humbling to post that you couldn't meet the challenge.

Big bragging rights when you get it in two tries. Or three. Or four. Really, if you finish we celebrate! lol.

We don't have any one-hit wonders yet. But it's bound to happen. I guess it's the equivalent of a hole-in-one. Although much harder, because at least in golf you have an idea of where to aim. With wordle, the first word is the biggest guessing game. 5 letters. Go. That's your clue.

I've used the Wheel of Fortune strategy. Trying to get as many of the letters R, S, T, L, N, and E in my initial guesses based on them being the most frequent letters in the Wheel of Fortune game. I feel like this strategy worked better before the NYTimes purchased the game. I think it got harder after they bought it. They claim that they didn't change any of the planned words immediately upon closing the deal, but I don't know, it feels harder and the words more obscure.

So every day we post our scores along with some pithy comments. 

"Got it going on today."

🤠

"Dang."

"boom baby"

"I thought my other guess was better."

"a struggle"

🤮

"yeah"

"grrrr"

"okay for an old geezer"

"whew!"

🥸

"ugh"

"oh well"

"Mr smarty pants"

Most impressive are my parents who are in their 80s and 90s. They never miss a day. 

We haven't created a leader board yet. We all have our individual stats but haven't shared it with the group. But it wouldn't surprise me if someone is tracking that! 

The best part of the game is how it's connected our family. 

Before wordle, I would talk to my brothers every once in a while. Months might go by. We don't live near each other and all have busy jobs and families so life would happen and we wouldn't hear from each other. Now we have something that connects all of us every day. 

It's pretty cool. 

We laugh, we vent, we brag and we support each other. 

#WordleManiaForever