Tomorrow I will, puzzle gods willing, mark day 69 of my perfect Wordle streak. I say this not to brag about hitting the internet's favourite number (OK, a little), but by way of explanation for the Wordle overdose I am about to suggest — to show you that I am no dabbler, that the madness is truly upon me. You could call it the MegaWordle, the Grand Slam, the Voltrordle. You basically cannot get more Wordle than this.
I have played Wordle every day for more than three months. (I lost a 10- or 12-day streak when I got a new phone in November — streaks are "remembered" by the Wordle website according to the device you're on.) I have also played every single clone, variant, and expansion I've encountered at least once, even the math-based ones. There's now an online guessing game for just about anything you can think of, from music to maps to the meaning of words themselves, with smart clue mechanisms and a handy shareable results format and a new solution every day that's the same for everyone. And judging by the decreased virality of each new version, compared to early novelties like Taylordle and Lewdle, the returns are clearly diminishing. The shark has well and truly been jumped.
But while the fun of the original format may wear off eventually, right now I simply cannot get enough. So when Dordle came along with its one-guess, two-games tweak, I added it into the routine. When Quordle arrived, I rolled my eyes, dived in, and shared my results in the usual fashion to our Wordle group chat, where we joked about how Octordle would be next. Of course, it was.
The very same day, we found Sedecordle. The sixteen-at-once Wordle clone lets you have 21 guesses, making it feel almost laughably easy as you unscramble a generous confetti of yellow and green tiles six or seven times in a row like you're Will Hunting casually solving an impossible equation on a chalkboard — until you have three words and three guesses left and you're sweating again. The sheer size of it, and the shower of useful data, make it a different game to the original, incentivising some more strategic initial guesses over pure correctness and giving you that five-green-tiles feeling over and over.
Out of all these doubled and duplicated Wordle clones, the elegance of Dordle and the chaos of Sedecordle were the ones that I kept going back to once I'd solved the OG each day. But then some days I'd be lingering over my morning coffee wanting more, or waiting for my pasta water to boil, and went back to add in the four-game and eight-game variants as well.
And one day last week, I got them all. (My partner, brutally unimpressed, asked pointedly if I still had a job. I retorted that this was my job now, and look, I'm writing about it, so technically I'm right.) The sheer satisfaction was a small personal bright spot in a black hole of multiple unrelentingly terrible news cycles, and I cherished it. I've only managed the full sweep again once since, and I don't attempt it every day (because I do have a job), but I plan to do so at least once a week until I'm properly bored of it all.
If you play Wordle, Dordle, Quordle, Octordle, and Sedecordle, that's 31 five-letter words of varying obscurity to guess, all up. Based on the Latin numerical prefixes used to name the latter three, this omnibus of -ordles could technically be called Untrigintordle, though I don't see that one catching on.
Call it whatever you want — the gauntlet has been thrown. We finally have a way to sort the Wordle elite from the filthy casuals.
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