A Retrospec-dle: Looking at Variants and Variant Timelines of Wordle

1. Intro So before I talk about Worlde, I actually have to talk about crosswords. You see, near the start of the pandemic, one of my best friends got really into crosswords. As a result, I got caught up in the riptide and ended up embedded in the outer fringes of crossword twitter; a pleasant place (from my angle anyways) where constructors and solvers talk about puzzles from various perspectives and also occasionally intersect with the other word-y, language-y games that exist on the web. It was via crossword twitter that I saw the first enigmatic WORDLE #, */6 and a seemingly esoteric array of grey, yellow, and green squares like some type of weird code. However, I didn’t fall down the Wordle-hole until a little bit later as I still parsing out lessons from the grid.

My first crossword and contribute to the 7xwords project.

During my primer into the crossword world, my friend/crossword mentor ingrained into me (or at least attempted to) some guiding principles when making a puzzle. How the relationship between the constructor and the solver was an inherently unbalanced dynamic. The solver sits down with puzzle with nothing but an empty grid and a series of clues. They don’t know what the end result might be. This brought up questions of “fairness,” and she constantly asked me if what I had assumed was common knowledge was actually something I just had the fortune of knowing. This brought up questions of “teaching,” of if I wanted to inform of the solver of a thing, and ho…