🌐 Browser2021Josh WardleEASYWordle rebuild deck
EASY
The only real logic in the entire product is the duplicate-letter two-pass, and describing it in the prompt is the whole difference between correct and wrong.
You will get essentially the whole thing.
The perfect one-prompt game and the standard demo for a reason. The only real logic in the entire product is the duplicate-letter two-pass, and an agent gets it right if you describe it and wrong if you do not. Ask for a test on that specific case and you are done in an afternoon.
- Difficulty
- EASY · 1 of 5
- First playable
- An evening
- The original
- 1 team-years
- Released
- 2021 · Browser
- Genre
- Word Game
Build a daily five-letter word guessing game. Single HTML file, no dependencies, works offline after first load. Requirements: - Two word lists: ~2,300 curated common answers and ~13,000 valid guesses. The answer is picked by index from a date offset, so everyone opening it on the same day gets the same word and it cannot be brute-forced from the source order. - Six guesses of five letters. On submit, colour each tile: green for right letter right place, yellow for right letter wrong place, grey otherwise. - Get the duplicate-letter rule exactly right: it is a two-pass count. First mark all greens and decrement a letter pool, then only mark a letter yellow if that letter still has remaining count in the pool. Guessing SPEED against ERASE must show only one E as yellow. Most clones get this wrong — write a test for it. - On-screen keyboard mirroring tile states, where green never downgrades to yellow or grey. - Animations: tiles flip in sequence with a 300ms stagger on submit, shake on an invalid word, and a bounce cascade on a win. - Stats in localStorage: games played, win %, current and max streak, and a guess-distribution bar chart. - Share button producing the emoji grid, with no letters leaked, copied to clipboard. - Hard mode toggle: revealed hints must be reused in later guesses. Definition of done: SPEED against ERASE colours exactly one E yellow, and my share grid pastes correctly into a message.
- The shared daily word — the whole cultural point was that everyone had the same one
- The New York Times distribution that made it a habit
- A hand-curated answer list that avoids obscure and unfair words
- Nothing technical whatsoever
date-seeded content, identical for everyone, no server
One date, one seed, byte-identical content for every player on earth, and no backend to run or pay for. It is the cheapest retention feature in games, and the whole thing hinges on never touching Math.random and choosing a timezone on purpose rather than by accident.
ScopeA weekend— build just this, not the game
Build a daily-content generator that needs no server. Single self-contained HTML file, no build step, no dependencies. DOM is fine. - A seeded PRNG, mulberry32 or xorshift32. Math.random cannot be seeded, so nothing anywhere may call it. - Derive the seed by hashing a 'YYYY-MM-DD' string into a 32-bit integer. Decide explicitly whether the day rolls over at UTC or local midnight and say so in the UI; that single choice is the difference between everyone getting the same puzzle and nearly everyone getting it. - From that seed generate a full day's content deterministically: a 12x12 maze, its entrance and exit, and three item positions. Nothing may depend on object key order, Set iteration or Date.now. - A date picker so any past or future day can be inspected. - A self-test button: generate 3000 consecutive days, hash each result, print one digest. Definition of done: the digest is identical in two different browsers, and reloading on a fixed date regenerates the same maze exactly.
Not a clone — Wordle re-themed and cut down to something you can finish. The angle is the important reel: it is what turns a project into a weekend. 24,360 ways to land.
Meet Cute Play By Mail
Wordle, but asynchronous multiplayer — no live server, set in a rom-com city. Rendered in PS1 low-poly with texture warping.
Build a browser game called "Meet Cute Play By Mail". The pitch in one line: a word game in the spirit of Wordle, but asynchronous multiplayer — no live server, set in a rom-com city. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Wordle — its core loop, and whatever makes that loop good — and rebuild it as your own game in a different world at a smaller scope. Use your own names, art and audio, which you want anyway: a reskin of somebody else's game is less interesting than a new one that works the same way. THE ANGLE — this is the important constraint, honour it above everything else Asynchronous multiplayer — no live server. Players take turns hours apart against stored state. You get real multiplayer with none of the real-time netcode. This is what makes the project finishable. If a decision would push the scope back towards the original's, take the smaller option every time. THE THEME A rom-com city. Timing, misunderstandings and set pieces in cafés and airports. Charm is a skill check; sincerity is the hard mode. The theme is not a coat of paint. Let it change what the mechanics mean — a reload, a health pack and a locked door should all be things that make sense in this world and nowhere else. LOOK PS1 low-poly with texture warping. Vertex-snap positions to a low-resolution grid in the vertex shader, use affine texture mapping so textures swim, dither to 15-bit colour, and fog the draw distance. REQUIREMENTS - Runs in a browser with no build step. Canvas 2D unless the angle genuinely requires 3D, in which case three.js. - Fixed-timestep update loop with interpolated rendering, so it behaves the same at 60Hz and 144Hz. - Every tuning constant in one CONFIG object at the top, exposed as live sliders in a debug panel. You will find the feel by dragging those, not by prompting. - All content — levels, entities, balance numbers — in JSON or plain data files, never inline in the logic. - Audio generated with the Web Audio API rather than asset files. - Respect prefers-reduced-motion: keep the fades, drop the shake and the parallax. BUILD ORDER 1. The core loop with placeholder rectangles, at the reduced scope the angle demands. No theme, no art, no audio. Make it fun as rectangles first. 2. The angle's consequences. Cutting to bots, or to turn-based, or to one level changes the design rather than just shrinking it — find out how and rewrite step 1. 3. The theme, as content and data. 4. The look, applied last as a rendering layer over a game that already works. Start by writing a one-page plan: the core loop, what the angle removes and what that frees you to do properly, and what you are deliberately leaving out. Wait for me to approve it before writing code.
- lynn/hello — open-source word-guessing game with variable word length
- leereilly/games — open-source HTML5 game index
Half the time one of these already does what you wanted, and the other half it saves you a week of solving a problem someone documented in 1997.
One count per game. No account — it is tied to a salted hash of your IP, which is not stored in a form anyone can reverse. Every build adds 1 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Wordle to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Wordle is EASY (1 of 5). You will get essentially the whole thing. The only real logic in the entire product is the duplicate-letter two-pass, and describing it in the prompt is the whole difference between correct and wrong. Reckon on an evening to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 1 team-years Josh Wardle spent.
What makes Wordle hard to rebuild?
The only real logic in the entire product is the duplicate-letter two-pass, and describing it in the prompt is the whole difference between correct and wrong. That is why it sits at EASY rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is date-seeded content, identical for everyone, no server — a weekend of work.
How long does it take to build a Wordle clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Wordle — the original took Josh Wardle on the order of 1 team-years, released in 2021 on Browser. What you can do is reach something playable and genuinely yours in about an evening, and then keep going for as long as it stays interesting. Any figure that claims otherwise is measuring a prototype and calling it a game.
What do I lose by building my own Wordle?
The shared daily word — the whole cultural point was that everyone had the same one. The New York Times distribution that made it a habit. A hand-curated answer list that avoids obscure and unfair words. Those are the parts a prompt will not hand you.
Which AI coding agent should I use to build it?
Any of Claude Code, Codex or Cursor will handle this prompt. Paste it as your first message, let the agent scaffold the project, then iterate on feel — the second, third and tenth prompts are where a game actually gets good. Work in an empty folder or a fresh git branch so you can throw it away cheaply.
One email when new games go on the list. No other reason to email you, ever.