Hasbro seems dedicated to going viral somehow. After announcing earlier in the week that they would 3D print your face onto a Power Ranger for the low, low price of $59.99, Hasbro also revealed that they've been developing a Wordle board game with The New York Times.
In the game, which will go on sale for $19.99 in October, one player takes the role of the host each round, writing down a secret word and having the other players guess it in just six tries, with the amount of points the players receive increasing as they use up more of their guesses. At the end of the game, whoever has the least amount of points is crowned the winner.
Wordle was first launched as a web game in October by former Reddit employee Josh Wardle as a pun on his own last name, creating it for his partner due to her love of word games. By January, 300,000 people were playing the game, and Wardle couldn’t keep up with the traffic, selling it off to The New York Times later that month.
Following the sale, Wardle went to work as a software engineer for the Williamsburg-based art collective and company MSCHF, which went viral earlier this week for their “EAT THE RICH” popsicles.
The simple concepts that Wordle and the games inspired by it ushered in have become gigantic cultural phenomenons, and corporate America has taken notice.
Just earlier in the week, Spotify announced that they've acquired the Wordle-inspired music guessing game Heardle, marking Spotify’s first ever entry into the game world and adding to the dizzying amount of new features Spotify has introduced in recent months.
The average user seems less excited by the trend, finding the idea even laughable.
\u201cdeeply funny that the central pitch of Wordle was Just One Wordle A Day and now the NYT has licensed a board game version dependent on many rounds of Wordle (and manual yellow/green shading)\u201d— Claire McNear (@Claire McNear) 1657819089
\u201cHasbro is partnering with the NYT to turn WORDLE into a board game. This version, which can be played in groups, is just like the mobile challenge, but focuses on willpower. If you share your results on social media, everybody at the table gets to punch you in the genitals.\u201d— Jarrett Bellini (@Jarrett Bellini) 1657821291
The Wordle board game is sure to be a Facebook mom favorite though, and if the Spotify news is any indication, the corporatization of the Wordle game genre is here to stay.
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