In 2021, the web-based word game, Wordle, took the world by storm. Developed by a Welsh software engineer for his family and friends, the game asks players to find a five-letter word in six guesses using color-coded clues to indicate correct letters in previous guess.
The game had around ninety players in November 2021, then 300,000 by the end of the year and over two million by the second week of January 2022. By the end of that month, the game was bought by the New York Times which has continued to make it free-to-play on its website.
The Times has since introduced some interesting analytics to help users understand the game, explore tactics and to see how they fare compared to other players and against the newspaper’s in-house Wordle computer, called Wordlebot.
Now James Dilger, from Stony Brook University in New York, says that this analytics page reveals far ...
