Trying to design the next Wordle

Five lessons from watching a game creator at work

Clive Thompson
UX Collective
Published in
9 min readJan 22, 2023

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A screenshot of the game Wordiply. The instructions are “you have five goes to get the longest word that includes the starter word. Scoring: The closer you are to the longest word, the higher your length score. The more letters you use in total, the higher your letter score.”

Would you be able to invent the next Wordle?

David Shariatmadar tried! And learned some fascinating stuff along the way.

Shariatmadari is a writer for The Guardian, and he set himself the task of creating a new word game. He spent weeks beavering away at it, batting around…

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I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net