Why new online puzzles can’t clone the brilliance of ‘Wordle’

Whenever I find that midnight has come and gone and I’m still awake, I immediately accomplish a daily ritual:

1. I play Wordle, the New York Times’s figure-out-the-five-letter-word puzzle;
2. And then I play another Times word game, Connections.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m one of millions who plan their waking hours around these Times games and others such as Spelling Bee. More media outlets than I can count have published stories about the news company’s booming game business, often with at least an undercurrent of snark (“[T]he Times has quietly become a video game company that just so happens to have a newspaper subscription, too”).

But it’s less a new thing than an old one that has transitioned to the digital age. Crossword puzzles have helped sell newspapers for more than a century; Jumble, a syndicated word game that takes about as long to play as Wordle, turns 70 this year and is (I just learned) available in an online version at The Chicago Tribune site and other venues.

Still, The Times deserves credit for being smart enough to acquire Wordle from its creator, developer Josh Wardle. He crafted a brilliantly polished and playable version of a word game akin to several existing ones. The Times has kept it going without messing it up; the whole thing retains the charm it had when the game first invaded our mass consciousness three years ago, in a way I might not have expected a large company to pull off.

The surest sign that the Times’s gaming foray is working is the influence it’s having on other purveyors of online news and related forms of content. Last December, media titan Hearst bought a startup called Puzzmo, giving the sites of papers such as the San Francisco Chronicle an in-house source of games. The Boston Globe site got a games hub in April. The following month, LinkedIn introduced three games, and Apple News, which already had crosswords in two forms (standard and mini), added a word game called Quartiles.

Most of the brainteasers on these sites and others seem to be trying to reconstitute the formula that makes games such as Wordle and Connections feel like daily necessities, without knocking off anything specific about their gameplay. Generally speaking, they do succeed in being little challenges that can be completed in a few minutes, and in feeling intellectually stimulating (or at least not like a total waste of time).

But the lesson of Wordle’s success is not that creating compulsively playable word games is easy but rather that it’s hard. Straightforward though it seems, that game offers a surprisingly deep experience: Guessing the word in two or three tries (yay!) hits totally differently than doing it in five or six (ehhh). That it’s even possible to winnow down the options in just a few attempts—out of all the five-letter words in the English language, or at least the ones in Wordle’s dictionary!—makes playing the game feel a little like performing a magic trick.

Part of the pleasure of playing Wordle is that it’s comfort food—exactly the same familiar experience every day, except with a different five-letter word. By contrast, playing Connections feels like a suspenseful, ongoing duel between me and the New York Times staffer who writes them all, Wyna Liu. Some days, I solve it as fast as I can click; others, it involves associations so obscure they make my brain hurt. About 15% of the time I give up on the game without completing it, waving a white flag as Liu, I can only assume, chortles out of earshot. Again, not a simple interaction between player and game to rekindle.

I haven’t found the Wordle-come-latelies on other sites all that compelling, though there are occasional flashes of cleverness, usually when one goes in a direction far afield of the Times games. LinkedIn’s games appear in the service’s iPad app but aren’t really playable on my iPad in its keyboard case (they come out sideways), suggesting that the company wanted in on the puzzle craze but didn’t invest unlimited resources in the effort. But they have an intriguing twist in that they show you who among your connections is playing, making them a sort of FarmVille for your professional network—in a good way, I mean. If it were possible to see which of my friends were playing Wordle or Connections, I might bond with the games even more.

I was also taken by The Boston Globe site’s jigsaw puzzles of Boston scenes, chosen by the paper’s photo staff—a rare example of a game having a tangible link back to the greater goals of the media property it appears on.

The internet has always been a vortex of fads that come and go, so if media companies other than The Times eventually lose their interest in gaming, it won’t come as a traumatic shock. I do hope they keep at it long enough to see if anything sticks, though. Blockbuster casual games—such as Scopely’s Monopoly Go—are often so fixated on getting us to keep playing and springing for in-app purchases that they feel like a near-relative of gambling, without the chance to win any real-world money.

The best thing about Wordle is that it isn’t a rabbit hole, a money pit, or even a guilty pleasure. It’s just a reliable moment of low-key fun that really is about the fun. The internet needs all of those it can get.

You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at [email protected] with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters.