Queerdle is the only good Wordle clone (because it's gay)

Wordle is the best gift given to us thus far in 2022. The viral word game, once not even a blip on the internet’s radar, has gained hundreds of thousands of devoted fans in just a few months’ time. Even The New York Times has written about it, now.

Here at Input, we’ve taken to dropping each day’s results in Slack; many do the same on Twitter, the arrays of green and yellow squares appearing like some strange unreliable code. Some players have taken to strategizing with scientific guesses, while others of us simply guess at random until it clicks.

A number of copycat Wordles have been birthed by the internet’s rabid curiosity about guessing five-letter words, many of which are just cheap rip-offs of the original. But there’s one spin-off in particular that’s captured our attention that we actually don’t hate: Queerdle. It is, in its creator’s words’ the “yassification of Wordle.”

Yasssss — Queerdle will look familiar to anyone who’s been playing Wordle. Each day there’s a five-letter word to be guessed in six tries; yellow letters are misplaced, green letters are correct, and grey letters are incorrect.

The most noticeable difference here — besides the soft pink background — is that each day’s word is noticeably queerer than what you’d find in Wordle. Creator @jbouvier programs them himself. They warn that some answers are “very NSFW.” They’ve also included a link at the bottom of the game to suggest words for future use.

The puzzle’s shareable output is also much more queer than Wordle’s yellow and green squares. The creator has been playing around with different emoji to denote your guesses. Right now a Magic 8 Ball stands in for a grey square; a banana stands in for yellow; and a snake represents your correct green square guesses. Past iterations of the game have used human emojis (like 🙅‍♂️) and coconuts (🥥) instead.

Thank you, Glitch — Queerdle is made possible by Glitch’s Remix tool, which allows users to create free web apps and open them up for others to riff off of. A Glitch app called “Worble” — another Wordle copycat — provided the starting point for Queerdle. All its creator had to do was yassify it.

Queerdle is still a work in progress. The code isn’t as clean as Wordle, and neither is its vocabulary. But 2022 has been harsh already, we’re all still stuck inside, and being visibly queer is taxing as all hell. We’re gonna take any opportunity to celebrate queerness and run with it.