Hurdle

There are in fact at least two variants called Hurdle, and we may as well include them both!

First up is Arkadium’s Hurdle, which strings together five games of Wordle, where the solution for the previous round becomes the starter word for the next. Except in the fifth round, where the four previous solutions are put in, and you only have two guesses to get the correct solution based on the clues given by those four words.

It’s an enjoyable version, because it requires you to successfully complete four standard Wordles in a row, where any failure means the whole thing is over. That really raises the stakes. That final round is where things get really sticky, since sometimes you just don’t have enough good information—and yet, I’ve completed it more often than not. So you will too!

The other Hurdle leans even further into the Mastermind approach to marking guesses, where instead of telling you which particular letters are correct, it just tells you that there are so many correctly placed, and so many correct but in the wrong place.

Accordingly, it gives you eight guesses instead of the usual six, but make no mistake: this makes it a far harder puzzle.