Are you a Wordle player? I admit I resisted for a while, observing friends on social media who daily shared their successes and failures at guessing the day’s word. The word game, created by Josh Wardle for his partner, who likes word games, has blown up in just four months. Interest and players have grown exponentially, from 90 players at the beginning of November to around 300,000 by the end of the year and ballooning to over a million in January, when The New York Times bought the game for reportedly over a million dollars. It’s said that 14 percent of American adults claim they play the game, one that is at once simple and challenging.

I’ve always enjoyed word games; I recall challenging my younger sister to homophone-spelling contests in our shared bedroom after the lights went out at bedtime. (I was clearly born to make my living through words.) So just about a month ago I succumbed to the online temptation and have played nearly every day since. If you are among the uninitiated, the premise, as I said, is quite simple: You have six tries to guess the day’s five-letter word. After typing in your guess and hitting “Return,” the screen shows which letters are in their proper slot (with a green background), which are in the word but in the wrong spot (yellow background), and which are not in the word at all (dark gray).

Regular players have developed strategies to help them find the correct word as quickly as possible, including beginning with words that contain letters most often found in English words (some prefer to focus on vowels over consonants). One can find websites devoted to providing hints or even the answers to the daily puzzle, as well as forums for fans. I ignore these, preferring to face the challenge on my own. I did appreciate learning early on from one of my friends, however, that a word can contain the same letter in more than one spot (the dreaded “double”); that saved me from getting through my six tries without a solution. In fact, yesterday’s Wordle was a double double, which really threw a lot of folks for a loop and led to widespread consternation across the web. (I’m proud to say I got it in five.)

I’ve found my fairly broad vocabulary helpful, but even more so is my observation of common patterns of letters and typical combinations of letters. Just as I found myself feeling fairly confident I could solve just about any puzzle, I learned there are variations on the original, created by others. Dordle by Zaratustra gives players seven chances to discover two five-letter words, with a daily puzzle plus “free play” if you don’t want to wait until the next day to play again. I find Quordle, by Freddie Meyer, really amps up the difficulty factor, requiring one to discover four words in a total of nine tries. Of the nine games I’ve played, I’ve only failed to figure out all four words in the allotted space three times. As with Dordle, you can play practice games to hone your word-guessing skills, and all of these games are free, with no subscription required.

I’m enjoying these new games which exercise my gray matter, force me to be patient and keep my vocabulary sharp. As our travel options expand and we begin to travel more frequently, I believe these will provide another option for passing time in airport lounges and at gates.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor