How Wordle Changed the Daily Game Genre Forever

In January 2022, Wordle went viral — coloured squares everywhere — and the New York Times bought it for a reported seven-figure sum. I wasn't building daily games then. When I started Artificially Incorrect two years later, Wordle was already the template in my head: one puzzle a day, shareable result, nothing to install. I treated those three constraints as fixed before I wrote a line of code.

One puzzle a day for everyone

Before Wordle, most games wanted unlimited play. Wordle did the opposite: one puzzle, same puzzle for everyone, come back tomorrow.

That constraint is social glue. Everyone talks about the same challenge. I copied that directly — one daily set of five rounds, same for every player worldwide.

What I copied from the emoji grid

Wordle's spoiler-free share format was the other obvious steal. Coloured squares that show your result without giving away the answer — compact, visual, made for group chats.

When building Artificially Incorrect, I copied the emoji grid and the one-puzzle-per-day cadence directly from Wordle. What I didn't copy: Wordle's binary correct/incorrect per letter. The share format for Artificially Incorrect shows round-by-round results across five rounds, so a perfect score looks different every day depending on which rounds you got right.

Finite play

Wordle takes a few minutes and ends. You close the tab. That finitude matters more than people credit — a clear endpoint instead of an infinite scroll.

Artificially Incorrect follows the same shape: five rounds, a score, done. I wanted the same "played, finished, moved on" feeling Wordle nailed.

What Wordle didn't solve for me

Wordle's word list is finite. A human curated it once and the game runs for years. My game generates fresh content every day — topics, statements, lies — which sounds like the easy part.

It isn't. Generation is cheap. Quality control is where the real work lives: checking facts, catching contradictions, making sure the lie is fair. I kept Wordle's daily cadence and share format. The engineering problem underneath is entirely different.

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, try it free is five rounds — same for everyone, shareable when you're done.