Spurred by this post on winter's gemlog lamenting the ongoing enshittification of Wordle by the New York Times, I decided to do a little post about some of the alternative ways I like to play Wordle.
Winter's Gemlog - Wordle Doesn't Need an Editor!
Like many others in the smolnet scene I was very nonplussed about the NYT acquisition of Wordle. I think we all knew exactly where that was headed eventually. Luckily so many people telegraphed what would happen that there is a plethora of ways to play wordle on a TON of different platforms without having to involve the NYT at all. This is far from an exhaustive list of Wordle clones. There are far too many to keep track of but these are the ones I play or at least have tried and enjoyed.
Of course we have to start with playing a Wordle clone directly on gemini! Requires a client certificate to play.
On my Palm PDA is my preferred way to play Wordle these days. This is a really nice way to play and it even can be played in sync with the official wordle words by entering an ID number for the current day which can be found on the palmdle website or RSS feed. Together with my hotsync script that I run every morning I have everything I need to play the day's wordle puzzle.
There are a number of wordle remakes for Game Boy and other retro game consoles. There may be better ones but I have not tried them all. This one is pretty well done though and even tracks your stats.
Speaking of worlde on other retro consoles here is one for the Nintendo DS that is pretty nice. Playing on the DS with the stylus works well and this has a neat feature where you can still share your results either via QR code or a text file that gets written to the SD card.
Being entirely text-based, wordle is perfect for the terminal. There are a lot of worlde clones so I'm just going to dump some of the ones I had saved here.
Lexeme, works well on small terminals
wordleTTY, play over telnet no installation required
"wordle", TUI wordle game with a nice visual representation
clidle, play over SSH or install locally
words, actually a set of 4 word games one of which is wordle
Play wordle on your wrist if you have a Pebble watch! Why not?
There are a number of other clones and archives of the web-based wordle that are not connected to the NYT. I'm not sure which ones are the best or if any are in sync with the "official" wordle but here are some. If you're playing along together with friends and family as long as you all use the same one then who cares if it's the same word as the official game as long as you're all getting the same word? Here is one I found. There are more but I didn't look into the web clones too much.