(NEXSTAR) – If you’ve ever been frustrated by Wordle’s astonishing ability to make you feel like an absolute fool, get ready to be thoroughly exasperated by “Worldle.”
The latest of many daily puzzles to try and capture some of Wordle’s success, Worldle tasks players with identifying one of the world’s countries by its outline. Like Wordle, the game also allows its players six chances to guess, and provides clues to the correct answer after each incorrect entry.
It works like this: Players who visit Worldle’s website are greeted with the outline of the “target” country or territory. Anyone who ventures an incorrect guess — say, Chile, for example — will be provided with the distance between Chile and the “target” country, as well as the direction of the target country in relation to Chile. The game ends when a player correctly identifies the target country or fails to come up with the answer within six guesses.
Win or lose, Worldle also provides players with a color-coded grid they can share to social media — because of course it does.
Worldle, meanwhile, just one of many “-dle” games to flood the internet in the wake of the original Wordle’s success (Lewdle, Absurdle, Nerdle, etc.). But what sets Worldle apart from its competitors is its brewing popularity: The game’s creator, a web developer who goes by @Teuteuf on Twitter, claimed on Feb. 13 that more than 577,000 had played that day, up from practically zero in early February.
On Tuesday morning, the game was also switched over to a new server to accommodate the influx in players, according to the creator.
“We are too many,” he wrote on Twitter. “I need to change my hosting service.”
Obviously, Worldle might not be everyone’s idea of a good time — specifically, folks who never bothered to memorize the shape of the Northern Mariana Islands. On the flip side, people who are well-versed in world geography might find the game a little too easy, which is a problem @teuteuf prepared for by giving players the option to hide the outline completely or “randomly” rotate the image of the country.
Most players, however, seem to feel that Worldle is already difficult enough, thank you very much.
“Worldle is hard because most countries are just lumps,” one Twitter user wrote.