A Wordle party game is coming this year, bringing the linguistic puzzler from browsers to tabletops.
A website (opens in new tab) and pre-orders for the game popped up recently. It’s the result of a collaboration between Hasbro Gaming and The New York Times Games, the latter of which acquired Wordle shortly after its popularity exploded. The game is $20 on Amazon (opens in new tab), Hasbro (opens in new tab) direct, and Target (opens in new tab), and is set to ship on October 1.
Wordle: The Party Game seems to play about how you’d expect. One host picks a secret word and the other players take turns trying to guess it, aiming for the fewest guesses possible and capping out at six. The player with the fewest guesses at the end of the game wins.
The party board game comes with a set of dry erase boards and markers to help players keep track of their guesses, as well as green and yellow tiles that the host can use to indicate how close those guesses get. It looks a bit fussy in the promotional video since the host has to check each player’s guesses individually, but there is something to be said for the power of basically anything being improved by the company of friends.
The game was apparently designed for two to four players and seems to come with enough boards, markers, and pieces to support a crowd that size, but in theory you could probably scale this up for a slightly bigger Wordle session.
On top of the social element, the big selling point here seems to be that this analogue version of Wordle obviously isn’t limited to once-a-day sessions. The New York Times is also promising a few variations of the viral game’s classic rule set: fast, timed, and team modes.
Wordle was one of the most tweeted-about games of the first half of 2022, second only to Genshin Impact. To get an idea of how it might stack up against other board games, be sure to check out these highly-recommended board games for adults.