Enlarge / Sometimes, building better Wordles means building the same Wordles... (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—When The New York Times acquired daily puzzle mega-hit Wordle at the beginning of 2022, there were plenty of skeptics who were sure it signaled the end of the game's incredible viral rise. Apparently, those skeptics included some of the people at the Times itself.

At a presentation at the Game Developers Conference Thursday, Times game producer and industry veteran Zoe Bell said the new owners expected Wordle's daily users "would just immediately decline" after the acquisition. Partly that was out of fear that some players would recoil from the "huge corporate behemoth" that now owned the indie hit. But it was also a simple recognition of the usual cycle for viral "zeitgeist" games: "How long can exponential growth go on?"

Just over a year after the acquisition, though, Bell said the company's efforts at "preserving Wordle as an Internet treasure" have paid off. That's largely thanks to a patient, "first do no harm" strategy that didn't seek to directly monetize the game or introduce a lot of half-baked changes to the game's successful formula, she said.

A sample game of Quordle. (credit: Merriam-Webster)

A year ago, the Wordle phenomenon was so huge that the venerable New York Times spent a "low seven-figure" sum to acquire the game and its massive player base. Now, a year later, the word-guessing game is still popular enough that blatant Wordle clone Quordle has been purchased by dictionary-maker Merriam-Webster.

As the name suggests, Quordle is simply a game of Wordle multiplied by four, with each guess simultaneously filling in information on all four boards. It's part of a wave of similar "multi-Wordle" clones that started with Dordle last January and has since expanded to include the ridiculous 100-fold guessing of Centordle and the absolutely ludicrous 1,000-fold Kilordle.

Apparently, "four at a time" was the sweet spot for Merriam-Webster, a 192-year-old dictionary company that isn't exactly known for daily puzzles in the same way that The New York Times is. But the Merriam-Webster website has included some basic word games and quizzes since at least 2015. And while the modern version of that Games & Quizzes landing page doesn't currently mention Quordle, the main Merriam-Webster website prominently features it as "a new daily challenge."