Alright, so let me tell you about this little ‘merry wordle’ adventure I had. It wasn’t like I set out to build the next big thing, you know? Just found myself with some downtime, the festive season was rolling in, and I thought, why not try to make our daily Wordle fix a bit more… well, merry. Seemed like a simple enough idea at the time.
Getting Started: More Than Just Tinsel
First thing, I figured, was the word list. That’s the heart of Wordle, right? So I thought, “Easy, I’ll just whip up a list of festive five-letter words.” Boy, was I wrong. Turns out, it’s not that straightforward. You get your obvious ones pretty quick:
- GIFTS
- SANTA
- TREES
- LIGHT
But then you try to get a decent-sized list, and it gets tough. Words like ‘NOELS’ or ‘YULES’ are fine, but then you start digging for more, and you end up with stuff that’s either too obscure or just barely festive. I spent a good couple of hours just brainstorming and then checking if they were actually common enough. Didn’t want folks guessing words they’d never heard of. That’s no fun.
Trying to Make it Look the Part
Next up, I wanted to give it a bit of a festive feel. I wasn’t about to go coding a whole new interface from scratch, mind you. I’m practical. I thought about just changing the colors. You know, some reds, greens, maybe a bit of gold for the correct letters. I poked around with some basic CSS styling on a local copy of a simple Wordle clone I’d found. That was another rabbit hole. Getting the colors right so it wasn’t an eyesore but still screamed ‘holiday’ took more fiddling than I expected. Green on red can be a bit much if you’re not careful.
I even toyed with the idea of adding a tiny snowflake icon or something, but quickly decided against it. Keep it simple, I told myself. The main thing was the words and a subtle festive vibe.
The Actual “Practice” and Some Headaches
So, I got my word list – smaller than I hoped, but manageable – and some color tweaks. Then came the actual playing, the testing. I roped in my family. “Hey, try this special Wordle,” I said. That’s when you really find out if your idea works or if it’s just a dud.
One thing I quickly noticed was that a themed list, even if the words are common, can sometimes make the game easier if people catch onto the theme too quickly. Or, if the theme is too broad (like “winter”), it doesn’t feel special. The trick was finding that balance. Some of the words I thought were “merry” were a bit of a stretch, and my testers let me know. “Since when is ‘CHILL’ a Christmas word?” Fair point.
There was also the classic Wordle problem: some words are just plain hard, festive or not. Double letters, uncommon starting letters, you name it. ‘MERRY’ itself is a decent one, but try something like ‘CAROL’ and you’ll still get folks stuck.
So, What Came of It?
In the end, this “merry wordle” thing wasn’t a polished product I was going to release to the world. It was more of a personal project, a bit of fun for us at home. We played it for a few days leading up to the big day. It was a good laugh, mostly. Some words were guessed quickly, others led to some proper head-scratching and a bit of friendly arguing over whether a word was festive enough.
What I really took away from it was that even simple ideas can have a surprising amount of detail when you try to actually do them. It’s one thing to say “let’s make a Christmas Wordle,” and another to actually sit down and wrestle with word lists and even just basic color schemes. It definitely gave me a new appreciation for the elegance of the original Wordle. Simple, but a lot of thought clearly went into it.
So yeah, that was my little foray into making Wordle a bit more festive. A bit of a fumble here and there, but a fun little exercise all the same. Always good to tinker with things, right?
