If you’ve been anywhere on the internet the past few weeks, you’ve definitely heard of Wordle, the vocab guessing game that brought little moments of fun to the January lockdowns (at least here in Ontario). And if you’re a parent of school-aged kids, chances are your little ones have been wanting to help you solve the daily puzzle. Unfortunately, it’s just too hard for most kids.
Enter Spellie, a Wordle alternative that’s made specifically for children. Christopher Porter, a Vancouver dad who runs the blog Canadian Veggie, had the idea to create it when he was playing the original Wordle game with his five-year-old daughter, Astrid. “If the word was one she knew, like ROBOT, then she had a chance of figuring it out,” he wrote on the blog post announcing the launch of the game. “But if it was something like QUERY, she was lost.” The new Wordle alternative has three difficulty modes. The easy mode uses four-letter words that are good for kids from kindergarten to Grade 2 and offers hints if they need it. The medium and hard modes use five-letter words, but never uses a word that a Grade 4 student wouldn’t be able to spell. As well, the amount of words that use duplicate letters has been reduced (because duplicate letters make solving the puzzle so much harder! IYKYK).
Another great feature is that the letters can be entered in any order, so if your kid has a green G in the third spot, they can click on that circle a...