The Wordle craze continues – not just in terms of the original game itself, but also with the spin-offs that continue to proliferate around it. The latest comes from software studio Omakase, and it’s called Heardle.
Simply put, it’s Wordle for music: you get a few seconds of a song intro, and you have to guess what it is. For every incorrect guess, more time is added to the clip. You can also skip a try to get an additional second. As with Wordle, you have to get the correct answers in six goes or less.
A couple of features make the game a little easier than it might otherwise be. First, the songs you have to guess are picked from the most streamed songs over the last decade, so they should all be relatively well known.
Second, as you start to type out your answer, you’ll see some possible matches: if the track you’re guessing isn’t in the database, you won’t be able to select it. That saves you from an incorrect guess and should give you more of a chance.
A new challenge every day
As with Wordle, you can share your results on social media using the familiar colored blocks. You can keep track of your streaks, and there’s a new challenge every day. The game can be played on any device with a web browser.
Based on the information included with the game, it doesn’t look as though any copyright permission has been given for this – all the included songs are available to freely stream on Soundcloud, and only 30 seconds of each one is played (if you guess correctly).
We’ll have to wait and see whether Heardle can grab some of the attention that Wordle has been getting. The five-letter word game has taken the internet by storm and was eventually bought by the New York Times for a seven-figure sum.
Despite the similarities, Heardle is something quite different, not just in the knowledge you need but also in the way the answer gets revealed. No doubt it won’t be the last web game looking to cash in on the craze that Wordle has created.