So I made a Wordle clone (with some extra features)

January 20, 2022 3:19 PM

So I made a Wordle clone (with some extra features)
I have been playing Wordle for a few months with friends from a Discord, and I really liked it, but I felt it had some shortcomings that I wanted to address. So, I made a Wordle clone. It's mostly the same as Wordle but

* You have to make an account and join "Leagues" - leagues are siloed Wordle puzzle sets that have their own rules. You can pick the # of letters, the frequency of the puzzles, whether Hard Mode is enforced, how long a puzzle is available to play, how many new puzzles are playable per day, etc. Leagues can also be private - I made a sample Metafilter league - it's 6 letters, once a day, with Hard Mode on.

* Leagues are scored over a "Series" - the length of a series is configurable by League and basically you can see leaderboards of everyone in the league with some stats.

* After you've done a puzzle, you can see everyone's answers and post comments on the solution page. This solved a big problem for me: spoilers in discord. You can just paste a link to the puzzle instead of posting your answer as a spoiled image. Anyone who follows the link can only see the results if they've finished the puzzle.

* Puzzle solutions show "how good" your guesses were - each guess has a number beside it that indicates how many possible words were left in the accepted-words bank after using all the clues you have been given to eliminate words. It highlight lucky guesses, missed opportunities, etc

* There's an explicit bot league - lots of nerds have had fun making Wordle solvers, but actually using them against people is mean, so I made a place for your bot to play. There's a link on the site menu with a sample bot and some instructions.

Note that the game is being run on an extremely modest server - it's been doing great with the traffic I have (~30 players) but if there's a massive influx that may change. Also, whenever I do an update (a few times a week usually) it may be down, usually for less than 1 minute. If you see something weird, wait a second and reload. All your guesses are saved - you can leave and come back to a puzzle with no problem, even on other computers.

Role: programmer

posted by RustyBrooks (8 comments total)

Something I forgot to add: the metafilter league is private so although I included a link to it up there, you have to have an invite link to join it.

Here's the invite link
posted by RustyBrooks at 4:01 PM on January 20, 2022

I appreciate the direct and explicit crediting of Wordle, thank you for doing that.
posted by Shepherd at 4:47 PM on January 20, 2022

loving it! one of the things I'd love the ability to do in your game and in Wordle is to not have to type in consecutive letters. so if I've got a green A in the third position and a green E in the 5th, I'd like to be able to type (or select) _ _ A _ E to help visualize words. I hope some more mefites join!
posted by QuakerMel at 5:12 PM on January 20, 2022

Actually I kind of agree with you. I tend to use X as a place holder, but I could easily allow space instead, and it just won't let you submit if there's spaces
posted by RustyBrooks at 5:15 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I had some trouble creating leagues. I made mistakes in both of the ones I just tried to create (Dog Walks is not descriptive, and the one with hard mode doesn't actually have hard mode turned on). But I don't see a way to delete or modify leagues I've created.
posted by QuakerMel at 5:36 PM on January 20, 2022

League creation is fairly new, so yeah, at the moment there is no (user) edit or delete. I can delete them for you. I'm actually not sure how to handle this, since settings really should be frozen once a league is created, i.e. I wouldn't want to be in a 7 letter hard mode league for a month and then the owner decides now it's a 5 letter 4x/day non-hard mode league.
posted by RustyBrooks at 5:39 PM on January 20, 2022

OK I deleted 2 erronous groups and I changed every-6h-play-weekly-series-5-letters-hard-mode to be hard mode.
posted by RustyBrooks at 5:47 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is great, started a league. I agree, ways to edit the league after a certain cycle would be great if you’re the creator / commissioner. Also, I might be not seeing it, but when exactly does the 24 hour cycle reset, and is it customizable when that happens?
posted by WedgedPiano at 9:01 AM on January 30, 2022