Byrdle

Byrdle follows the Wordle format with a choral word list. Every day brings one answer drawn from the world of choirs, church music and singing, the same for every player. Answers include composers, proper nouns, plurals and musical terms in other languages. You type any valid word of the day's length, and the tiles show which letters are in the right place, which are in the word but elsewhere, and which are not in it at all. A five-letter day gives six tries and a six-letter day gives seven.

The game started on 12 January 2022, the day after the choral meme account QuireMemes joked about a choral Wordle, and it was soon covered by Classic FM, the Church Times and USA Today. It ran through its first list of 316 words in order. Since then it draws from a second list of 316 words, shuffled afresh for each 316-day round, so a word comes back after about ten months.

The game has a sense of humour about its subject. Solving quickly might earn a Gloria in excelsis deo, a slow solve is compared with the length of Psalm 119, and other messages borrow lines from anthems and the liturgy. A clock icon opens a historical mode for playing past Byrdles. Settings add a hard mode, a dark theme, a colour blind palette and a fancy font. Results can be copied and shared, and the game keeps your statistics and streak.

Byrdle suits singers, organists and anyone who knows their anthems from their antiphons, and plays in a couple of minutes.