Do you have a thorough understanding of countries, islands, and borders? Worldle is the most recent offshoot game to draw inspiration from the daily word puzzle Wordle, so you can put that hypothesis to the test right now.
Worldle (notice the added L) is a word guessing game that displays a black shape representing a nation on the globe rather than a series of letters.
Players must use their knowledge of the global map to identify the nation based on clues such as size and form.
If you make a bad guess, the game tells you what percentage of the way there you are, as well as how far away the actual nation is in kilometers from the one you picked. You get five chances to get it right before you have to give up.
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Fans of geography and travel have been wondering about this game since it was released on January 27 as a bit of fun by French web developer Antoine Teuf.
On the site itself, he acknowledges the format’s originator, writing, “WORLDLE has been heavily inspired by Wordle, created by Josh Wardle.”
“A few weeks ago, I discovered the original Wordle and I instantly loved it,” Teuf told The Independent.
“I really appreciated how effective and simple it was, and love how it allows everybody to play together with a simple sharing of the result as a small text with emojis.
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Because of this, I choose to create a regional variation. During our discussion, my partner brought up an old Facebook game called GeoChallenge, in which players had to identify the nation based on its outline.
“I made the game in just a few days.”
After a few weeks, he was shocked to see that it had surpassed 1,000 daily users. There are now hundreds of thousands of them.
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“Yesterday 970,000 people played Worldle! I can’t believe it,” Teuf tweeted back in February.
Another daily map guessing game, Globle, started on January 30 with a somewhat more sophisticated style, showing that Wordle isn’t the first geography quiz to borrow a page from it.
This time around, you have to estimate a nation to begin, and your selection will be colored anywhere from light pink to red depending on how well it matches the country of the day.
The game is far more visually appealing, but without the distances that Worldle provides, it is much more difficult to find the proper nation with only a few guesses.
Globle’s creator, Abraham Train, conceived up the idea in mid-January as a way to exercise his design and programming chops.
“It’s inspired by Worldle, of course, and the geography games on Sporcle,” says Train, who is currently looking for web development work.
“I’ve heard nice things from all sorts of people, including travel fans, but the kindest feedback comes from geography teachers who want their students to play. It means the world to me that the game is being used as a teaching tool.
On a regular basis, fans of both games express their joy and consternation on social media.
