Redactle

Redactle, a spinoff where you guess the words in a redacted Wikipedia article, is one of the latest hits to emerge from the Wordle-induced Cambrian explosion of indie guessing games. The "-dle" games just keep coming and coming. Someone could fit them all into some tangled taxonomy at this point, tracking the relationship between the world's Heardles and Worldles, Nerdles and Squabbles.

Redactle, like Semantle, is difficult. At your own risk, give it a shot. You'll see a Wikipedia article with so many redactions that it looks like the Mueller Report, and you'll have to guess words, any words. The article will become easier to understand as you gradually identify previously redacted words. You win if you correctly guess the title of the article. The correct answer for each day is derived from Wikipedia's 10,000 Vital Articles (Level 4). That means that possible articles include Greco-Roman wrestling, Algebraic topology, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but not List of classical music concerts with an unruly audience response or Bread dildo (yes, this is a real article).

When you play a word, it appears on the right side of the screen with a count of how many times it appears in the article — if it appears at all. It's also revealed within the page, so you can start uncovering whole sentences and getting hints as to what else to guess. You can also navigate to each instance by clicking on a word in the list.

Things in categories appear to be the way to go, and that's what I'll try tomorrow to improve on my pathetic first attempt, which took me 130 guesses.

The Wordle aspect is minor, with the only similarities being that it is played online, it is free, and there is only one per day. The latter point is critical, because I've wasted far too much of my life visiting a Wikipedia page about something as simple as London and then spending two hours reading about the gestation period of sloths or whatever.

One game was enough to convince me that I'll be playing it on a daily basis from now on, and that it will join the ranks of our best Wordle alternatives, alongside Hurdle, Quordle, and Adverswordle. Although I'll still wait until I've solved today's Wordle puzzle before moving on to this even more difficult puzzle.

How to play Redactle

Using mouse

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