Dordle

Dordle is a small browser game by the independent developer Guilherme Tows, who publishes as Zaratustra. It went up on itch.io in January 2022, at the height of the Wordle craze, with the one-line description "wordle plus wordle". That is an accurate summary: two secret words, one keyboard, and every guess counted on both.

You type a five-letter word and it appears on the left and right grids. Each grid colours the letters against its own answer, green for the right letter in the right place, yellow for a letter in the word but elsewhere, grey for a letter that is not there. Wordle gives you six guesses for one word; Dordle gives you seven for two, so there is only a single spare row to cover the second board.

That spare row is what makes it interesting. Once one word is solved you often know a good deal about the other, but you cannot afford many wasted guesses on the first. The keyboard shows both boards' colours at once, split down the middle of each key, which helps you track what you know.

Dordle sits between Wordle and the bigger multi-board games. It inspired Quordle, which uses four boards and nine guesses, and through it Octordle. If Wordle feels too quick but four boards sound like a chore, this is the one to try.

The daily number counts the days since the daily mode went live on 24 January 2022, and the game draws that day's two words from its answer list with that number as the seed. It keeps your stats and streak in the browser. Since October 2023 the options screen has an export and import button, so a save can move to another device or survive a change on itch.io's side.