Josh Wardle hosts first live Wordle competition

Wordle, a viral internet phenomenon, is just as fun to play in person at a live competition as it is at home by yourself. On Friday, hundreds of people participated in the first live Wordle competition at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Connecticut.

For some participants, this was their first experience with the word game, which involved six rounds for the ACPT competition. Some newcomers whispered to the people sitting next to them, asking questions about the game, but many of the Wordle players in the ballroom were fans and veterans of it. “I am so stuck,” one participant muttered as he struggled to fill the five-letter boxes and guess the correct word.

Between rounds, people debriefed, talking about the words they had chosen for the previous round, joining in quiet laughter and commenting on the difficulty of the game. “I did it too fast,” one person said, reflecting on his failure to guess the correct word in his six allotted guesses.

Despite not playing Wordle every day, Sid Sivakumar, a 25-year-old crossword constructor from St. Louis, won the competition.

Before the competition began, Josh Wardle, the creator of the game, which was recently purchased by The New York Times, spoke to the crowd of competitors.

He shared an email from a Wordle player in Nebraska who wrote about playing the game alongside his parents. “We don’t have a lot in common even though we love each other a lot,” the player had written, adding that he’s gay and his parents are conservative Christians. “Wordle has given us a way to come together every day,” he went on. “My mother loves that regular contact with me, and it’s something that I enjoy, too — that distracts me from all of the difficult differences that are between us.”

In his speech, Wardle reflected on the shareable nature of the game. “If there’s one word a day, and that word is the same for everyone, suddenly you’ve created this social experience where you can talk with other people about the experience you had,” he said. Wardle said the word game he created reinvigorated his family group chat on WhatsApp — so much so that the family had to start a whole new chat, just for conversations about Wordle.

Wardle, a software engineer, initially created the game as a gift for his partner, who also attended Friday’s competition. The game was released to the public in October, and it exploded in popularity in a matter of months.

After Wardle wrapped up his speech, the crowded ballroom buzzed in excitement and anticipation. Hundreds of people were glued to their smartphones, preparing to begin the first round of the game.

Wardle created a special program for the evening with a unique URL and a fun nickname, ACPTLE. When he gave the cue to begin the first of six rounds, the room went silent. Participants looked at their phones with intense concentration, tapping into their mental dictionaries of five-letter words.

Just as in a traditional game of Wordle, players needed to guess a predetermined five-letter word in only six tries, similar to the process in “Lingo,” a popular late ’80s game show. A yellow square indicates that a Wordle player guessed a correct letter but it’s in the wrong spot, and a green square indicates that the player guessed a correct letter and it’s in its correct spot. When the player gets the word right, every square turns green.

The only difference from the ACPT version was that players played six rounds of the game instead of one, with the goal of scoring as low as possible by the end of all of the rounds. Every word used across the rounds had to be unique, a rule that stopped people from using their go-to starter word — such as “adieu” or “radio” — to kick off every round.

After the sixth round, Will Shortz, the editor of The New York Times Crossword puzzle and the host and director of ACPT, shared score ranges, asking contestants to raise their hands when the numbers applied to their scores.

Sivakumar was the last person to raise his hand, coming in with the lowest number — and, therefore, the highest score — out of all of the participants. “I feel like I was the least deserving to win the Wordle competition,” he said. “It was anyone’s game — I just happened to be the lucky person who made the right guesses.”

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