A New Wordle Spin-Off Is Impossibly Difficult
Successfully repeating the process four times gives you four possible guesses on the final round of the Wordle spin-off.
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Wordle, an incredibly popular word-guessing game published by The New York Times, is spawning more spin-offs than Star Trek, Star Wars, and Minions altogether. The original game became so popular that the NYT acquired it from an individual developer for an undisclosed amount, after which it saved a life and began spewing spin-offs. Though none of those spin-offs are officially related to the game, they’re built on the foundations of the original, with each one bringing novelty to the gaming concept. Now, a new Wordle spin-off adds a layer of difficulty to the original game.
Meet Hurdle, a Wordle spin-off that requires you to solve five of the five-letter word puzzles in a row. One of Wordle’s unique selling propositions, and the key to its success, is that it allows you to solve only one word puzzle a day, with the whole world playing the same puzzle together and sharing their results. This fantastic five-minute occupation has only one downside — it lasts five minutes tops. According to Kotaku, Hurdle introduces some unique challenges compared to the original game.
As with Wordle, you have only six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with correct letters marked in yellow and correct letters in correct positions marked in green. Once all are green, you’ve won the game of Wordle. But not Hurdle — in this game, a random letter of your first solution becomes your first guess on the second puzzle. Depending on the server-sided choice of randomly selected words, these guesses can be super helpful or not helpful at all.
Successfully repeating the process four times gives you four possible guesses on the final round of the Wordle spin-off. Unfortunately, that means that your fifth puzzle provides you with only two guesses at the last word and the information provided by the previous four solutions. Admittedly, this may sound like there’s too much luck involved in the game, but there isn’t — games don’t operate on luck. Your luck in guessing the letters; that’s an entirely different debate.
Like the rest of the Wordle variants, Hurdle is also free and likely not as loaded with trackers as the original game. The game is developed by Arkadium Games, a low-key gaming website with a surprisingly rich history. It will ask you to create an account from time to time, but you can always decline and continue with your game of Hurdle or whatever other interesting thing you happen to stumble upon there. To some, Hurdle seems just like it sounds — a hurdle. But let’s remember that a variant called Nerdle which presents you with math problems you have to solve.
In the end, it’s another day and another Wordle alternative that will certainly gain more attention in the coming days, at least until another variant pops up and gets people’s attention — sounds upsettingly familiar to the last year’s news of different variants popping up like mushroom after rain. While on the subject, have you heard of a Wordle variant that tests your Avengers trivia?
