Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
More:Daily news, true crime, and more USA TODAY podcasts
Hey there, listeners. It’s Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech. It’s the middle of February, and people are still fascinated by Wordle. Clearly. It’s the best, most popular, most viral game of 2022. And it feels like it’s just been around and we can’t get enough of it. And of course, as part of this, because it’s been so popular, we’re seeing all these different spinoffs.
Here is a new one that I just wrote about. You can read about this on tech.usatoday.com. I also have a link to the game itself. It’s a geography-inspired take on the game called Worldle. I have practiced trying to say Worldle a gazillion times, and I still feel like I’m saying it wrong. But basically, it’s Wordle with the extra L, so Worldle, and basically, it’s a geography-based version of the game. Here is how it works.
You all know how Wordle works. You get a five-letter word. You have six chances to guess. The letters change color, all that stuff. For Worldle, you get the silhouette of a country or a region, and you have six chances to guess it correctly. So the way it works is, when you play Wordle, if you guess wrong, the letters flip, and then you’ll know what goes where. So you see a green letter, you know right letter, right spot. If it’s yellow, the letter’s in the word, but it’s in the wrong place.
With Worldle, you will see a series of green and yellow boxes that pop up that indicate how close the country is to your guess. So, for example, let’s say the answer is Italy, and I guess France, it will show you you’re 60, 70% away from the destination, and it’ll give you a distance in kilometers indicating how close you are, and it’ll actually have an arrow which indicates where exactly the country resides compared to where your guess is.
So if, again, taking my example, you have Italy, you say France, it might show you’re however many kilometers away, and then it’ll have an arrow pointing toward where Italy is in relation to France. So it very much has that same kind of rhythm as Wordle, only with geography. It’s really fun. It also has a lot of the sharing elements as well. And we saw Worldle popping up on Twitter under that hashtag, a lot of people trying to figure out what the country is.
So it’s tapping into a little bit of that social element. It’s a really fun game. It is interesting though. It’s not perfect because I had one reader who popped in on Twitter and let me know that if you try to pop in certain countries like Wales or Scotland, it doesn’t pop up, which is interesting. So it’s obviously not a perfect experience. There’s little bugs like that, it seems, that could disrupt it, but overall, it’s still a fun game. It’s a fun twist on Wordle.
If you are in love with Wordle and need some other fix, obviously there’s a zillion ways to go. But I think this game, Worldle, is just interested because it’s a different twist on it and in a very different. It goes away from words, kind of the same concept, but a really cool twist to it. You can read more about this game. You can read more about everything related to Wordle, how to play it, tips if you’re having problems, where to find the Wordle archive if you have missed puzzles and want to go back to the beginning, you can do that too. You can find all that information on tech.usatoday.com.
Listeners, let’s hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, or show ideas? Any tech problems he wants to try to address? You can find me on Twitter @BrettMolina23. Please don’t forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. You’ve been listening to Talking Tech. We’ll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism