Squares Game Wordle

[Brayan Jacobsen]

Thisessay first appeared in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter so you don't miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations on what's making us happy.

Here's the short version: You have six chances to guess a five-letter word. With each guess, the game tells you which letters are correct letters in the right spot (green squares), which letters are correct letters in the wrong spot (yellow squares) and which letters are not in the word at all (gray squares). For instance, if the word is LIGHT and you guess GLOAT, you will get yellow-yellow-gray-gray-green squares, showing you that the word has an L and a G, but not in those spots, and that it has a T at the end where you put it. A new game is released every day, so everybody is playing the same one at the same time.

It did not take long for me to conclude that Wordle is a metaphor for life, meaning that you can learn a lot about different ways to see the world from different ways to play Wordle. (If you are inclined to attribute this discovery on my part to prolonged social isolation along with seasonal madness as I stay inside my house to avoid breaking my kneecap while walking my dog across crusty snow and ice, I say: Stay out of my private thoughts, you.)

For one thing, there is easy mode, and there is hard mode. You switch between them by toggling a setting. The difference is that in hard mode, you have to incorporate the letters you've already gotten into your next guess, so that every guess could plausibly be right, based on what you know. This means, for instance, that if you guess RENTS on your first try and you learn that the first letter is indeed an R, then you can't guess BALMY on your next try just to see if you can nail down some more letters. You are constrained to guesses that include that R. If you post your results after playing in hard mode, they appear with a little asterisk. "This person played on HARD MODE," the game tells all your friends, just to make sure that they know without your having to communicate it to them. It is the humblebrag of Wordle.

But of course, you can choose to play in hard mode without switching the game to hard mode. You can play in hard mode on the honor system. This means that you will not get your little asterisk next to your results, but you will know you played on hard mode. You will know you carefully incorporated each piece of information into your next guess. As often happens in life, you are presented with a choice between telling everyone that you overcame an obstacle and smugly knowing and keeping to yourself the delicious knowledge that you overcame an obstacle. (Perhaps you can tell from this description which I prefer.)

Would you rather play it safe and BALMY and be better equipped to avoid the difficult six-guess day or the dreaded didn't-even-get-it-on-the-sixth-guess day; or would you rather bet on yourself, on your capacity for glory, and fly Top Gun-style into battle with your ROYAL flag waving?

And how superstitious are you? Some people start every day with the very same first guess, usually something like CARTS or TRAIN that has a lot of common letters in it. Other people (I am one of these) take a different stab at it every day.

And do you think you need a method, a trick, a hack, a secret strategy? I am strangely preoccupied with last letters, myself. Once I have a sense of where one letter might be, it's surprising how often the possible last letters begin to contract in number. But in all likelihood, this is no better as a solution strategy than anything else; I just like it. Because it's how I do it. It's how I Wordle. And I've been Wordling for about ... two weeks. So clearly, I have massive experience to draw from.

All I'm saying is this: Your approach to this word game is critically important. Just critically important. At least that's what I tell myself when I wake up with insomnia at 4:30 in the morning and think, "Ooh, I can play Wordle!"

Use old keyboard style

How Squardle's keyboard used to look. Enable this option if you want the keyboard to only have keys that are purple, light gray, and dark gray.

Show dark gray keyboard clues

Turn any letter that can't be placed in either direction for the next guess dark gray on the keyboard. This ignores fully solved words. So it will darken keys for letters that already appear in a fully solved word if your hints say that the letter can't go anywhere in the unsolved word you're currently guessing.

Show yellow, red, and orange keyboard clues

Display yellow and red keyboard keys for the row and column you're about to guess in next. Keys where the letter has a hint in that row or column that has more arrows than the number of solved such letters in that direction will turn yellow or red. Note that this means that already greened squares won't cause the key to be yellow or red, even if there are yellow or red hints. Keys that would be both yellow and red turn orange instead.

Colorblind friendly keyboard

Display arrows on the keyboard for yellow, red and orange keys. (Note that the keyboard will never display double or triple arrows.)

Notes optionsNotes can normally be set as a guess or as certain. Disable either (or both) if you don't use them to save a few clicks or misclicks.

Disable "Mark note as guess":

Disable "Mark note as certain":

First click marks note as a guess

Enable this option to make the first click on a square without a note make a note marked as a guess instead of as certain. (This setting is not availible if either note type is disabled.)

Use old version of share emoji

The new version shows how the grid looked after your first solved word and says how many guesses that took. Enable this option if you prefer to keep using the old share emoji that always shows how the board looked after you had guessed once in each row and column.

Disable instructions on startup (unless something's new)

Remove the startup instructions unless there's an update, and even then only show that page once.

You can still click here to manually go to the startup page.

Before sending bug reports related guesses or answers with repeated letters, first read the FAQ about how double and triple arrows are supposed to work.

Message me on @FubarGames on Twitter , /u/FurbyFubar on Reddit, FurbyFubar on Discord, or send me an e-mail to pel...@gmail.com. If the problem is something you can take a screenshot of, even better!

If it's a bug related to cookies, (ie for your stats or saving of game states), your can copy the text with the contents of your cookies here. (Please longpress the text to mark it and then copy it if you're on mobile, a screenshot won't help me as the full text doesn't fit on one screen.)

New game mode: Squardle 24One of the most requested features for Squardle has been something I can't do: A freeplay mode of Weekly Squardle. This is sadly not possible, because someone playing it a lot would fairly quickly run out of boards that aren't repeats (or near repeats) of other boards. Squardle 24 is a game mode that's as close to a freeplay version of Weekly Squardle as I think is possible while still not running into the issue of running out of non-repeating boards. Weekly Squardle boards have 25 squares to solve. Squardle 24 instead has, you guessed it, 24 squares.

In Squardle 24 there's a single hole on the board, and there are 8 words to solve. You start with 9 guesses.As the final word you guess still won't give a bonus guess, this means that there are 7 bonus guesses to unlock.So assuming you get to all bonus guesses, the maximum number of guesses you can make in Squardle 24 is 16, so it's the same as in Weekly Squardle*.

The reason for the final word solved not giving a bonus guess is that I wanted it possible to win by the skin of your teeth.That is, to win with 0 guesses remaining. For this same reason Weekly Squardle has only 8 bonus guesses, despite having 10 words to solve. This is because the final square you solve when you win a weekly board always solves both the word in its row and column. Yes, in hindsight this is needlessly confusing, and I also underestimated how much fun it is to get bonus guesses. But it's a bit too late to change how it works now as that would just confuse (and upset) my current players. Just don't confuse yourself into thinking that this means that your final guess that doesn't give bonus guesses; if your final winning guess solves more than the minimal number of words it can solve you do still get bonus guesses for those words! This means that using fewer guesses to solve a board always gives you that many more guesses remaining at the end.

The single hole square on the board is randomly placed in one of the five squares on the diagonal where your guesses overlap. While always placing the single hole in the center of the board would have been nicely symmetrical, placing it randomly makes for more diverse gameplay. You will never get to guess in the row/column that has the hole. Note that the adjacent squares in the row/column with the hole do not necessarily form words. This is indicated by slightly thicker lines between those squares. (If I'd made it so that they did have to always spell words, we'd run into the issue of running out of boards again.)

If you play in English, Squardle 24 uses a word list of possible answers that's bigger than the list Daily/Freeplay Squardle uses, but shorter than the one currently used by Weekly Squardle. So playing a loads of Squardle 24 still won't tell you all the words that can show up in Weekly Squardle. If you play Squardle 24 in any non-English language, the list of possible answers is the same as in Daily/Freeplay Squardle for that language.

Stats and streaks are not stored for Squardle 24. So if you're stuck in a game of Squardle 24 and need to start a daily or weekly board before midnight you can simply enter incorrect guesses until you get game over and it won't affect your stats.

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