A Wordle game jam has inspired a handful of weird little tabletop games

Matthew R.F. Balousek has thoughts about WordleThe same as he uses dice. The Hostos College lecturer tells his student to consider a game tool’s affordances — all the things it can do — and then strike from that list everything they have seen used in a game. Sure, dice can be rolled in order to display a number. You can stack, spin, align, and even huck them across the room.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Wordle, the browser-based word game phenomenon created by Josh Wardle (who recently sold it to the New York Times), stuck in Balousek’s creative craw long enough that he created an impressive collection of game design musings before realizing he needed to just sit down and make his own game. Balousek wasn’t content just to toil away on his own, so he started The Wordle Jam to invite others with the same five letter spirit.

For those who have somehow completely missed the quaint zeitgeist that is Wordle, here’s a brief rundown: players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word by inputting letters into a grid. Yellow will appear for incorrectly placed letters, and green for those with spot-on placements. All other information is greyed out as well on the grid and keyboard. The smartest part is its ability to be shared on social media in what Balousek calls “the mosaic,” which has become the conversation opener du jour in group chats, Discord servers, and Twitter threads. But it’s also given designers new and old pause, with many surprised by its virality as well as its simplicity.

The Wordle Jam’s inspiration lies in this.

“I think any time there’s a non-zero number of things being made, that’s it. That’s the whole ball game,” Balousek told Polygon in an interview. The only thing a niche movement required was a name. Balousek was willing to give it, along with a website landing page. The Wordle Jam ran through January 31 and managed to accrue 10 entries, including Balousek’s, but he wasn’t preoccupied with measuring success and instead delighted by all the ways people had transformed the simple letter blocks into fully extant experiences, tools, and even poetry.

Image: Lynne M. Meyer

Lynne M. Meyer’s The Cottage, The Witch and The Wordle sprung from the tabletop RPG writer’s fascination with finding the right word for a task and the power that connection provides, especially in the context of practical witchcraft. Uses her game WordleThe results are used to determine points which can be spent on features for their witchy cottage in the woods. An apiary, a second floor library or sufficient candles could be added to improve performance. Meyer was very grateful. Wordle’s solitary nature and wanted to give the contemplative players more to chew every day.

Designer Pearse Anderson took a similar path, however his entry was titled Your True NamePlayers are placed in the literal shoes of the mystic words themselves as they are spoken into existence by covens, summoning circles, or any other group of magic practitioners. Players can use every word as a journal prompt to describe the effect of the spell. The power of yellow letters increases volatility and the power of green letters makes it more powerful.

“Because the WordleAll players are subject to changes every day. Your True Name are working towards a globally consistent and randomized goal,” Anderson told Polygon via email. “I can play with a friend in Utrecht or Ulaanbaatar, and though we start our fantasy worlds in different places, our spellcasting converges at the True Name of that day’s Wordle — that’s magical.”

Balousek’s own entry, Wordle GamesPicks at the seams Wordle’s construction in playful and interesting ways. The 12-page zine contains five entries, though the first — A Wordle to Leibowitz — is a playful interpretation of Wordle’s rules “in case this zine survives the en masse destruction of knowledge and civilization, but computers don’t and so we can’t play Wordle anymore,” he wrote.

Image: Johnny Willcox-Beney

KingslayerTransforms WordleYou can turn it into a prompt for a story about an assassin or their mission. Each row is a representation of a character from their life. Colors and the shape of the mosaic all get translated into places, personalities, and even the form of the assassin’s weapon. Shapes aren’t so serious, but they do matter. The Cloud Looks like a ButtPlayers are simply asked to create an image of themselves that is similar to any shared mosaic by a friend. It’s cloud watching for the terminally online, unfortunately distant or playfully interpretive.

Swordlecery and SwordleceryBalousek acknowledged that the game is more of a puzzle than a game. It converts the yellow and green scores from each column into abilities scores that can be written on either the hands of the other hand (or paper) or shared with a friend. The rest of the day the player plays the role of an adventurer, using a six-sided dash and recorded stats in order to overcome mental and physical obstacles. It might make it easy to be annoying your Dungeon Master, or even inspire some live-action role-playing. The adventurer is killed at midnight and reborn with new statistics.

The Wordle Jam’s existence hints at our fascination with seemingly simple games. You can imagine that the other entries will change the answer to album art or the mosaic shapes are farm animals who need to be kept in check. WordlebuildingWord guesses are used as worldbuilding prompts. WaddleThis chart shows the penguin’s escape route from their zoo enclosure.

“There are rules all around us,” Balousek said. It is important to test the rules when playing roleplaying or other games. He believes that anyone can enjoy tabletop roleplaying games, even though it may be niche. Wordle would benefit from playing the jam’s entries if only to see how people can alter the assumed walls of an experience to create something wholly unique.

“One of the first steps is to draw from real life and identify those rules that are all around us,” Balousek said. “Rules will always be around us as humans, governing our spaces. Tabletop games allow us to think about them and what might happen if they suddenly change.”