The New York Times has announced a new feature that allows you to make your own Wordle puzzle to share with friends. You need to be a Games or All-Access subscriber to create puzzles, but no subscription is needed to solve them.
You aren’t roped to regular Wordle’s five-letter structure, either: Allowable puzzles can be anywhere from four to seven letters long. They must be on an allowable word list; as with regular Wordle, this means no proper nouns, for the most part. Profanity is not allowed, nor are gibberish entries like “ASDFGJ” (I tried).
Here’s a link to a Wordle-style puzzle with four letters that I created for you—because I consider all of you my friends. (This is not the puzzle I’ve used to create the screenshots in this article, so no worries about spoilers.) Good luck!
You’re invited to play a puzzle created by Beth.
The clue is: “This one has teeth!”
https://www.nytimes.com/games/create/wordle/emnhCsAP5q-f2uhIJ5xJI95SwS7u2Lmf60S7H5-0wfp78bsvf9h-YhkOIryKZDrlwCPV
How to create your own Wordle on the NYT Games site
Here is the link to the puzzle creator. You need to be a Games (or NYT All-Access) subscriber to use it. When creating a puzzle, you’ll enter your solution word, your name, and an optional clue. After creating the puzzle, you can share it with a message like the one above. Anybody can click the included link and play the puzzle, no subscription required.
When you solve somebody’s puzzle, you can share your results in much the same way as a regular Wordle solution, but there’s also an option to include spoilers. This could be a fun way to show your guesses to the person who created the puzzle.
Yes, I was mean.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki
Custom Wordles can be surprisingly challenging
When playing around with this tool, I discovered that Wordle-style puzzles that aren’t five letters are harder than you’d think. I found myself struggling to think of any good seven-letter words at all. The puzzle still gives you six guesses, same as with a standard five-letter Wordle, no matter how many letters are in the solution. Good luck with the longer ones!
