This is a post about multiple wordles and the point at which they hit diminishing returnles. If you don’t know what Wordle is, this post is not for you and also, how is life back in 2019? Just so you know things are about to be terrible, maybe forever.
Ever since we all collectively lost our minds over trying to guess a word once per day and then telling our friends whether we had guessed the word or not, people have been trying to come up with new ways to guess a thing in a certain number of guesses. You can now fill up your day with guessing chords, prime numbers, D&D monsters, peptides and more. I expect by the time I publish this someone will have created wordle-dle, a game with the goal of guessing the wordle variant, at which point I expect the universe will implode.
Anyhoo, I found the original game interesting for a short while and then got bored of it. With one word and 6 guesses, there’s still a good chunk of luck in there and it didn’t really scratch my puzzle itch. Similarly some of the variants I enjoyed for a bit but found too luck heavy. Sedecordle (16 wordles), though, I really like and still sometimes go back to if I have a few minutes between things – the luck element is drastically reduced with so many words going on at once, and it’s much more logical which I enjoy.
Recently I tried duotrigordle (32) for the first time and enjoyed it maybe even more than the 16-wordle variant, which got me thinking – how many wordles is the most fun you can have? People have made them with up to 1000 words that I could find, and there are ‘choose your own number’ versions where you can go even higher. I suspect the answer is very variable depending on how much time you have, how much tolerance you have for repetitive tasks etc.
For me, 32 was the sweet spot – beyond that, too many of them were too easy to figure out from pre-existing information. Even then, I only really enjoyed it when I played with three random starter words – using my usual ones honed on sedecordle which hit all the commonest letters it was too easy.
This is my personal wordle enjoyment graph. I’d be interested to see other people’s, though!
