The Wordle Clone Arms Race: How Dordle, Octordle, and Worldle Spawned a Viral Replication Loop

Josh Wardle’s Wordle—born as a private puzzle for friends—exploded into a rare “untainted” viral sensation, untouched by algorithms or monetization. Its 2022 acquisition by The New York Times sparked paywall fears, yet the game remains free, sustaining its status as a communal ritual. Like arcade clones or Flappy Bird imitators, Wordle birthed a meta-genre: Dordle (2 puzzles), Quordle (4), Octordle (8), and beyond, escalating to Duotrigordle’s 32-grid frenzy. Content mills now obsessively catalog these spin-offs, mirroring gaming’s endless cycle where innovation begets imitation—a dance as predictable as tomorrow’s five-letter guess.

Dordle is two games of Wordle at once. You get seven guesses. Your guesses go into both puzzles.

Not enough? Tridle is three games of Wordle at once; you get eight guesses.

You want still more? Sure, we’re all adults here. Quordle is four games of Wordle at once; you get nine guesses. You’ve probably picked up on the pattern here by now.

Beyond that? Absolutely, why should we be bound by the rules of the past? Octordle is eight games of Wordle at once, with 13 guesses.

You’re not yet satisfied? So we stray still further from divine grace. Okay, then, Sedecordle is 16 games of Wordle at once, with 21 guesses.

Even more? Let the angels weep then. Duotrigordle is 32 games of Wordle at once, with 37 guesses.

What? More, even than that? Why not, let’s abandon all the laws of heaven and earth. Sexaginta-Quattordle is 64 games of Wordle at once. It’s slightly more forgiving than the other versions, giving you 70 guesses instead of 69. Once you get to this scale, Wordle’s whole nature changes. After you use a couple of spare guesses to get some info about the words en masse, your aim is to try to correctly guess one word per turn, and use the information revealed by those guesses to solve the others.

This brings us to Kilordle, 1,000 games of Wordle at once, with 1,005 guesses. This may sound just like an exercise in extremity, but some care was put into it: the puzzles you’re closest to finishing are sorted to the top, and solved ones are removed entirely. Also, you can get more than one word on a guess, since you’re awarded credit for words you have all green letters for. When you get near the end and single guesses can eliminate 20 words or more, it almost feels like a clicker game. When playing in bulk like this, your strategy tends to change to the general case: using every letter in every position in as few moves as possible. I’ve seen someone mention winning in as few as 75 moves this way, and a computer program probably could do it in even less, but writing software to play Wordle for you is discarding one of its chief virtues: that you don’t have to think too hard about it.

The Case of n=1

If you just want more than the daily Wordle, Wordle Unlimited (which I’m amazed hasn’t had its name changed) can provide that, as can WordPlay, and Word Master, and wordle.gg.

There used to be at least two sites that let you play past Wordle puzzles, but the New York Times requested they be taken down when they gained ownership of the original game and name. Boo, hiss!

If you want to play locally at a command-line, and have one of a couple of scripting languages installed, you can try wordle in Ruby or wordle-cli in Python.

But what if you want to play in Urdu? Urdle. Chinese? This. Swedish. French. Or, without using the letter E. Or maybe one where the answers are all ludicrous misspellings of the word HORSE.

If you’re having trouble with basic Wordle, the New York Times has a bot that will look at your previous games and offer advice.

Mutations

These are Wordle, but changed, or with a special focus.

Star Wordle‘s answers have a Star Wars theme, but you can still guess normal words to help with narrowing it down. Another version of the concept is SWordle. Along these lines is Lordle of the Rings. Wizarding Wordle, to Harry Potter.

Taylordle answers all refer to Taylor Swift in some way. Byrdle answers all relate to choral music. Gordle answers are all hockey players. Basketle answers are basketball players. Bikle, for cyclists.

Squabble is online-based battle royale multiplayer Wordle, where correct guesses become attacks against other players, and incorrect ones cause you damage.

Absurdle changes the answer behind the scenes to be as difficult as possible. You still only get six guesses. Another version of the idea, which lets you decide on the word length, is Evil Wordle. Adverswordle plays a bit like that, but with the computer guessing and you giving it clues to matching a secret word you come up with, and can change if you want, so long as you don’t contradict yourself or make it impossible.

Luckle changes the answer behind the scenes to be as easy as possible. You get six guesses, but they won’t matter.

And now, it falls to my weary shoulders to inform you of the existence of Letterle. At least you get 26 guesses.

Variations

Like Wordle, but with extra stuff added.

Crosswordle gives you two words, that are related and cross at some point.

Waffle is Wordle, but with a grid of six words, and instead of guessing on a blank board, all the letters are given, but scrambled. A move consists of swapping two letters. You get 15 swaps; a perfect score is 10 swaps.

Scrabwordle gives you fewer guesses (depending on player-selected difficulty), but gives the secret word’s Scrabble score as a hint.

Squardle… okay, this is going to require some explanation. Squardle sets aside one of Wordle’s chief virtues, simplicity. It’s still fun, but a subtly different kind of fun. It has a grid like Waffle (see image of solved game to the right). You make guesses, but in turns, and along two lines at once: your first guess is along the top row and left column (DWELL and DROSS in the image). You always guess the same word in both. You’ll get clues along both lines based on your guesses (the small letters in the image, which accumulate as you guess). Yellow letters mean the letter can be found somewhere along the same row, and red letters are along the columns. Orange letters mean one of that letter can be found both vertically and horizontally, along both the row and column. Green letters are in the right place, as in Wordle. Notably black letters, the B and N in the shown puzzle, won’t be found anywhere, even in other words.

Inspired

Not really like Wordle at all, but they still have daily puzzles.

Heardle challenges you to guess songs from a snippet. With each wrong answer the snipped gets longer. Those like me will be hopelessly lost.

Worldle has you guessing a nation by its shape; the hints from incorrect guesses take the form of facts about the nation. Similar to that is Globle. And, down in Flaggle Rock, you guess the flags of countries and territories.

Who Are Ya? is a similar concept, but with portraits of football (a.k.a. soccer) players.

Framed asks you to guess a movie from stills, doled out one per guess.

Mathdle wants you to complete arithmetic number sentences. Nerdle is similar, as is Mathler. There is also Primle, where you have to guess a prime number. Also, Primel.

Subwaydle is of interest mostly to New Yorkers, challenging you guess a route between two given subway stations. MTRdle is the same, but for Hong Kong’s subway system.

Poeltl is basketball players again, but with game-related clues instead of the usual green/yellow/white letters.

Semantle tells you how close semantically, as judged by an algorithm, your guess is to the hidden word. There is no guess limit, but it’s very challenging, and guess counts of over 100 are frequent. Make sure you read the directions, as you might not be prepared for what semantic closeness means. Pimantle is the same idea, but with a cool visualization.

Redactle drops players into a ‌top 10,000 Wikipedia article‌ stripped to its skeletal prose—only common words (like "the" or "and") remain visible. Your mission: deduce the article’s ‌full title‌ by strategically guessing missing terms. Unlike Wordle’s five-letter brevity, Redactle demands marathon thinking; niche topics (e.g., obscure chemical compounds) might require ‌200+ guesses‌.