Wordle-inspired Guess the Board Game puts a tabletop twist on the viral puzzle game
Do you know your Knizia from your Hargrave?
A board game-guessing puzzle inspired by viral word game Wordle has popped up online, challenging board game fans to test their tabletop knowledge each day.
Instead of guessing individual letters in a five-letter word - with correct letters marked by a green square, or yellow if they’re right but in the wrong place - Guess the Board Game sees players using details about a random board game to correctly guess its title. (The app encourages players not to turn to BoardGameGeek's database for help, for obvious reasons.)
Players can choose which details they reveal, from the game’s designer, publisher and illustrator to its player count, play time and even a brief gameplay description. Each revealed detail subtracts points from the player’s maximum possible score, which is multiplied based on how many attempts they take to correctly guess the answer.
Like Wordle, Guess the Board Game offers a single puzzle each day to solve in your browser, with everyone who plays the game sharing the same answer.
Web app developer Let’s Play Board Games launched Guess the Board Game on January 12th, acknowledging that it had been “inspired by Wordle's simplicity and modesty (great short fun and asks nothing in return)”.
Wordle, created by software developer Josh Wardle, has taken the internet by storm over the last few weeks, with countless Twitter users posting the now-ubiquitous grid of squares representing their attempts to crack each daily word puzzle.
The game’s viral popularity has been driven in part by its limitation to a single shared word for each day and its free availability via a web browser - which hasn’t stopped a number of paid clones popping up on mobile app stores in search of a quick buck.