Around two months ago, I created my own twist on the game Wordle. Zerodle is a variant of Wordle, inspired by the likes of Quordle and Sedecordle. Each of these games presents a certain number of Wordle puzzles which must be solved simultaneously with the same guesses. Zerodle takes this concept to the extreme, with a grand total of zero different Wordle puzzles, all of which must be solved at once.
So The New York Times just bought Wordle. This is not surprising, but it’s definitely disappointing. Wordle is an uncommonly successful small project in a Web dominated by large corporate platforms, and its acquisition only leads us further in that direction.