Review: The Wordle board game sucks

WordleIt was an act of kindness. This free-to play word game, which offered only one puzzle per day and was released quietly at the COVID-19 epidemic’s onset, took 200 days to reach critical mass. The game was popularized by players covering social media posts and text threads with gold tiles in December 2021. The game’s simplicity, and its subtle yet compelling challenge, granted us a much-needed shared cultural experience. We might not have all agreed on when or how to reopen our public schools, but at least we could admit that Wednesday’s double-L word puzzle was a real pain in the ass.

Wordle: The Party Game This tiny bit of joy is then hammered into a cardboard box measuring 8×10 inches. A barcode is added to the back and the product is sent out for sale on retail shelves all over the globe. You can have a digital version of this experience with up to four players. But, it doesn’t allow you to hide any of your errors from the outside world. It is hangman with a bag of colored tiles and a “host” who wanders the room passing judgment on your guesses in real time. This is a joke. It’s about as much fun as taking a standardized test.

Image by Hasbro

It is not functionally flawed, though. This game recreates exactly the feeling of the original, down to the way the font is kerned. The tablet-like sidesboards are sturdy and feature dry erase markers. You can also hide any work with a paper shield. There’s even a handy list of words, from ABATE to YEARN, to help hosts who lack inspiration when the time comes for them to guide the group into the next round of guesses.

However, the design is almost insignificant. The much-hyped variant of team-play would have been a nice touch, however, the functional aspects that depend on team play are non-existent. “Team up!” if you have more than four players, it says, seemingly making a concession to the dearth of components in the box. The “fast” mode and the “timed” mode are only just barely supported by the design or the bits. The manual suggests that you just go faster. It offers a winner-take-all system and a suggestion for a 60- or 90 second timed round. They don’t even bother to toss in a sand timer.

It just seems lazy, overall. Maybe that’s why no individual designer has taken credit for its creation. It’s a cut-and-paste job, start to finish.

Guessing games don’t seem to be new. In July, Ars Technica’s Kyle Orland made that painfully clear by tracing the genre’s origins back more than a century to Bulls and CowsThis is a game of number guessing that has been around for so long, it’s now part of the public domain. In 1955 Jotto innovated on the format by switching from numbers to words, creating what is — in retrospect — a head-to-head version of Wordle Two players.

The reason guessing games exist for over a century is that they provide a platform for creativity. These are the modern classics of this genre: Codenames (currently on sale for $12.99), an evocative guessing game that encourages parallel thinking and scales well — even with groups of eight or more. Crypto (currently $24.99), one of Polygon’s 22 best modern board games, takes things a step further by adding multiple associated words to the mix. The game also features a standee, which uses a red filter in order to conceal words from opposing teams. The Mind On the other side, it distills the guessing games genre to the bare essentials. It is currently $9.74. GhostbustersYou can also get a session of electroshock therapy and a tarot card reading. Hell, search your grandparents’ house long enough and I assure you that a copy of MastermindYou are sitting there, all those chunky bits of plastic lying on your table.

I’m not upset, but I am disappointed.

You could use this opportunity to show your guts. Wordle to create something special, a tabletop experience that makes sense only on the tabletop — an experience that uses the mechanics of a game that everyone knows as a springboard to make something even more rich and exciting. Instead, we have this lost opportunity that is, nonetheless, currently wedged into the top slot on Amazon’s board game section.

Somewhere in a board room — maybe in a shared text message thread — you can almost hear the echoes of a struggle between the designers and the marketers at Hasbro. “We could use this to make something special,” someone says. “No,” says the marketing team, tossing in a thumbs-down emoji. “Just put the game in a box and get it on the shelves in time for next Christmas.”

Wordle: The Party GameIt is everywhere. It is a complete sham. And it’s selling like hotcakes. We wish you a happy new year.

Wordle: The Party Game The reviewer used a retail copy from Hasbro and New York Times Games. Vox Media also has affiliate relationships. Although these partnerships do not impact editorial content, Vox Media could earn commissions when products are purchased through affiliate links. Find out more. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.