It was inevitable that the popularity of viral word guessing game Wordle would inspire clones, and thus only a matter of time before one of them popped up on Linux.
And lo, it has.
elementary OS gets to call first-dibs with Warble. Built by Andrew Vojak, Warble is described as a “native Linux word-guessing game built in Vala and Gtk for elementary OS.”
The aim? Just like Wordle (and the 80s gameshow Lingo) you need to figure out what a mystery five letter word is in as few guesses as possible.
There’s no time limit so you can you take your time typing in a (valid) five-letter word to see if it matches. Letters you get in the correct place are highlighted in green (so you know they go there again), while letters that are the word but not in the right location are highlighted in yellow.
Darkened letters aren’t in the word at all, so you can avoid using them again.
Andrew says there are three difficulty levels to choose from —normal requires you to use guessed letters and hard introduces six letter words— and almost 5,000 potential answers to ferret through. Better yet, if you need a break (i.e. to go consult the nearest dictionary) you can close the game and come back later to pick up where you left off.
Like Wordle, Warble keeps tabs on your progress as you play to serve up some scintillating stats after you win (or fail) a round:
Unlike the OG Wordle, which gives everyone the same word to guess day, Warble picks its words at random, making it more of a solo game than a social one others can tackle alongside you.
But in Warble you can can play as many times as you like — just remember to sleep at some point and let the dog out for some exercise, okay?
Some of those cashing on the word game’s virality have financial motives, with Apple removing several copycat games from its App Store (one requiring monthly subscriptions of over $30 to play, which is insane).
In all, Warble is a faithful homage to the current puzzle du jour. It’s perfect for passing some time as you wait for a download to finish, a kettle to boil, or a certain blogger to post something new 😉.
Warble is, as far as I can tell, free and open source software. You can build it from source with minimal effort (I mean, hey: I did it):
Alternatively, if you use elementary OS 6.1, you can get Warble from the App Center. It’s listed for a recommended price of $1 but you can download it for gratis if you do you-know-what:
It’d be great to see this app hit Flathub for use on other Linux distributions, or at least something similar — so if you hear of anything before I do, please do shoot me and email to let me know. Turns out you can install elementary ‘App Center’ Flatpaks on other distros, details in this comment, but it may not work as well as it does on elementary OS.