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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

When I first discovered Wordle, I immediately looked for a way to keep playing with new random words, something that most clones have implemented.

After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. What makes it fun to spend 10 minutes on the game is that it's the only round of the day so there's a pay-off to giving it some thought. When you can keep playing new rounds, it's just not rewarding and I would just close the tab when I was stumped.

Had I invented Wordle, I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day which is surely one of the critical elements of its success.

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> After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun.

Absolutely. If that limitation wasn't there, the game would've definitely fizzled out within days and maybe even never made to it the popularity it has now. The slow sustained popularity, with people posting their results on the shared daily word is the key to success here.

It's the only reason people are still talking about it more than a month later.

This is also why I strongly prefer the HBO release model to the Netflix model.

For me, the HBO model for Wordle would be one guess a week, and ~6 weeks to complete a game.

I think that's correspondence chess. Or correspondence something, at least.

Or watching a football game 5 minutes at a time, every week.

Game of Thrones really showed how successful it can be. Season 1-4 really was an amazing time to be a fan.

But that also made it possible for them to succumb to mainstream fan culture, the cult of the badass and so on, they wanted to ride the attention wave :(

The HBO model works better for shows that are going to have more than one season because in the first season people haven't generally heard of it.

Strongly disagree on this assertion. Each to their own, so I'm not going to pretend that we're having an objective discussion here to start with :P. Personally the wordle model works for, something like wordle, but doesn't extend much further. I lose interest in a story fairly quickly if slowly drip fed over weeks and months. As a result I have watched FAR more shows after Netflix model than before it; I suspect I'm not the only one. I will wait until all episodes are released first to even start watching now; but often, don't continue with shows with HBP release model at all and move on to something else. The entire point of a story (for me atleast) is to get sucked into a different world and find out more while your mind is engaged. The "pay off" waiting a week to find the next bit of information is far less than the friction of first, abruptly being thrown off your train of thought, and secondly, to start caring about the story a few moments before or as the next episode is being played. Its like chasing a deep bug in the weeds of legacy code base and then suddenly having to have to switch context for a week and then told to chase that bug again. Even if I find it next time, there's no satisfaction anymore.

To be fair there's two things at play here. On the one hand, I agree it may be more enjoyable for you to watch it all at your own pace. On the other hand, I think it's objectively true that the HBO/Disney model does more to keep a show in the headlines and the cultural pulse. Look how shows like WandaVision dominated Twitter every week for 2 months. The only two shows that have managed to have staying power on Netflix were Tiger King and Squid game.

> Had I invented Wordle, I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day

This is the core mechanic of a newspaper crossword (or the NYT Spelling Bee) which inspired Wordle. It’s really no surprise when you think of it that way.

I have been playing Quordle as well, and now find Wordle very slow and dull. I'll persist as long as my streak is active (60+ or whatever) but bail if it breaks. I play 10-20 games of Quordle a day and find it more interesting, challenging with IMO more difficult words, etc.

But I can appreciate that one shared round was key to Wordle being noticed.

+1 quordle making wordle seem dull.

But I only place the official once a day. I suck at it I think, but they do a great job of making it rewarding.

Also their continuous improvement on the front end is a daily side game, to see what they changed today.

Yeah they added links to dictionary, which as a non native speaker, find great (I was already searching for words I didn't know, and now it's super convenient)

quordle seems to be the ideal number of boards, 8 and 16 get too easy because most of the letters show up somewhere and you get into the mopping up phase pretty soon.

Agreed -- sedecordle seems to have far less risk-of-not-succeeding peril than quordle.

I've also tried Octordle now, that one's super challenging. In a harder version like that one, having a practice mode you can repeat as much as you want can be addicting on its own

I tried the Octordle one and found it easy enough but awkward to play. Quordle seems like the winning combo. The way I've found to keep Quordle really interesting is trying to win in six moves as many times as possible (got it nine times so far), and then trying to finish in seven more times than nine. That's made the Practice Mode "sticky" for me.

This mechanic you describe is actually quite common in freemium games. Games like Farmville don’t let you burn yourself out and purposely make you wait and come back hours or days later to get that dope rush.

Don’t they let you pay to bypass that?

> This mechanic you describe is actually quite common in freemium games. Games like Farmville don’t let you burn yourself out and purposely make you wait and come back hours or days later to get that dope rush.

They don't do it to avoid burnout, they do it as a payment gate-keeper: you have to pay to progress in any meaningful way.

The daily bit is clearly modeled off the New York Times daily word puzzles, and it's obvious why the NYT bought it to add it to their collection of daily word games.

The NYT day resets at the same time for everyone though

and I wouldn't be surprised if they change wordle to do that at some point.

True, but so long as you play it at roughly the same time every day, you're going to encounter a new puzzle at that time, time zone differences notwithstanding.

> I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day which is surely one of the critical elements of its success

It's different anyway, but how are people building routines around remembering to visit a certain website once a day? Do they just see the shares on Twitter and remember to go play themselves? Do they bookmark it? I certainly can't build a routine around a novelty like Wordle.

My wife and I have made it part of our morning routine to play it while we drink our coffee.

> Had I invented Wordle, I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day which is surely one of the critical elements of its success.

It's probably the same with Twitter's char limit.

In some ways it reminds me of Twitter - the innovation was in restricting the content, not in adding more features.

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