You Can Now Play Wordle On A Game Boy

The viral word game Wordle has attracted a lot of cash-grab imitators, but most of the homages weren't free and running on decades-old hardware. One intrepid modder has designed a simple version of the game that can run on Game Boy hardware.

Twitter user ghidraninja showed off their handiwork in a short thread. It shows the familiar Wordle interface with a simple letter input below, running on both an original Game Boy model and the Analogue Pocket. You can toy with the browser version if you don't have Game Boy or Analogue hardware, or download the ROM to actually play it yourself on Nintendo's first handheld system.

Unlike the viral word game, it's not limited to a single puzzle per day that everyone shares. Instead, you can keep playing for as long as you'd like, as the puzzle will automatically reset to another word when you win or lose one.

Ghidraninja notes that they couldn't fit a large list of "real" words due to the limited ROM size, so instead the game uses a filter to check if the entered word is one of the 8,000 most common English words. This does have a high error rate, though, so you very well could enter a word that doesn't actually exist.

Meanwhile, the real Wordle that set off the viral sensation has been sold to the New York Times and will be integrated as part of the newspaper's puzzle section. The company has said that the game will remain free "initially" but that it will serve as part of its strategy to increase its subscriber base in some way. If you're worried about Wordle going away, you can save the entire game before it moves to the NYT servers. For help getting started, which may or may not apply to this filter-generated Game Boy version, check out our best Wordle starting words and other tips guide.