Since being launched by developer Josh Wardle in October 2021, Wordle, has spawned numerous variations. One of them, Worldle, moves the game from the realm of vocabulary to geography: It gives players a shaded outline of a country and six tries to correctly guess where the locale is.
As with Wordle, Worldle flashes green, yellow and gray squares. The difference is, here the more green squares you see the closer you are geographically to the right country.
Worldle shows the distance your guess is to the actual location. (It’s in kilometers but you can change that to miles in the Settings section, and even hide the country image for more of a challenge.)
While Worldle hasn’t reached Wordle-level of fame, the once-a-day game did garner more than 500,000 players on its first day, according to its creator.
“You crazy people!” Worldle creator @teuteuf tweeted. “It was supposed to be just a small side project! We are now half a million who played #Worldle today! Wtf?! Thanks to all of you!”
The game also seems to have inspired its own knockoff app, Earthle, which is ad-supported and has a paid subscription version.