Twitter and social media users across the world have either already been introduced to Wordle or are increasingly confused about the strange colored boxes Wordle players keep posting on their accounts. Wordle is a simple and quite fun word puzzle game that's gone increasingly viral over the past few months. It's going viral due to the way players are able to share their daily solving efforts, which don't include spoilers. The strategy is working out, because Wordle is once again trending -- though for a particularly fun reason.
In Wordle, once players complete the daily puzzle they're encouraged to share their results on social media. The results include a chart of their guesses with black or white square indicating missed letters, yellow indicating correct letters in the wrong position, and green denoting correct letters in the correct position. Also attached to these messages is a count out of six indicating how many guesses it took to get right. Today's Wordle, however, is trending for "Wordle 204 X/6", which means players were unable to complete the word.
There's been a huge surge of Wordle players just in the past week. These players have been gifted what many might describe as easy words to solve for. Sunday's word, however, threw many of these new players for a loop. It was the first many players saw that letters in the word could be repeated. As a result, these players missed all six of their guesses, leading to the "X/6" result when they share.
What makes today's trending failure particularly enjoyable is the diverse range of responses that Wordle players are sharing on Twitter. A surprisingly commonplace excuse is that the players were drunk or "impaired." Others, as previously mentioned, noted they didn't realize the solution could have two of the same letter. Many are baffled that the puzzle doesn't simply solve itself and that it's possible to lose at all. More than a few bragged about putting in ridiculous words with no intent to solve the puzzle.
It just goes to show that there's more to Wordle than first meets the eye, as there is a meta quality to Wordle that goes beyond a simple puzzle game. The social media experience of sharing results makes it more about the story players tell as a community rather than solving each day's individual puzzle.
This can also be acknowledged what may be a major moment in Wordle history. Wordle is genuinely trending today based on players failing to solve the daily puzzle. It may be Wordle's biggest day yet. Puzzle number 204 could go down as when Wordle truly became one of 2022's biggest games.
Wordle is available now via browser.