Globle – Wordle For Our Whole Planet
Globle is the newest game taking hold that is fashioned off of Wordle but employs our whole planet as a guessing grounds
If you aren’t playing a game ending with “-le” (or at least the equivalent sound) on the internet every single day when you wake up then what are you even doing with yourself? This brand of quiz game has taken root in the collective consciousness over the better part of this year and the craze has spawned all different versions for all different interests and skills. It’s been quite the run and there are more seemingly cropping up every day. One of them following the Wordle energy is Globle and it’s basically what it sounds like. Each day we are taking a “trip” around this blue orb of ours to find a spot on the map.
Let’s take a look at Globle, how it relates to other games in this genre, how to play and what these games are all about.
WHERE ON THE GLOBE DID THESE GAMES START?
While Globle is a game all about our world, these types of guessing games didn’t get their start with this one. No, that credit goes in large part to Josh Wardle of Wordle fame who brought these into the collective consciousness. Using a very simple premise and a style that made it easy for almost anyone with even a limited vocabulary to get started, Wordle took over the hearts and minds of many an internet denizen in 2021 and 2022.
Wordle (like Globle) is simple in its gameplay and offers a consistency that’s sometimes tough to find in daily internet games. Guess a five-letter word within six guesses. Easy right? Well, there is some trial and error involved here and that’s the rub. If a letter is marked green, you got it in the right spot in the given word. If it’s yellow then you are on the right track, but you need to put the letter in a different place. Keep going until you get the daily word and then share freely with others to let them know you are better than them. Easy peasy.
And it’s easy to see why Wordle would have spawned so many derivative games like Globle over the last year. The New York Times swooped in a purchased the game from Wardle for what has been reported as a price somewhere near one million dollars (though it remains free to play). If you have a little coding acumen and an idea for a theme (along with a catchy name) then why not make a Wordle-like game for yourself and others? It just makes sense.
WHAT IS GLOBLE?
Globle is a game about the globe, meant to test your geographic knowledge. Think you know all of the countries out there? Well, you are about to be put to the test on that. Because, man, there are a lot of them. In fact, there are 195 countries, in all, throughout the world so we are bound to get some repeats throughout the course of the year. But some you will definitely need to see twice in order to keep them straight.
In Globle, players need to hone in on a certain country with just a few ways to get there within the allotted number of guesses. Players start by guessing a country at random. When that happens, the country will light up on the map a certain color. Globle uses the hotter and colder strategy to let you know if you are close on the map or not. Light yellow means you might want to spin that bad boy around to the opposite side. Dark red means you might be right next door.
Globle gives a topographical view of the map without borders that can make it difficult to “picture” which countries are lined up next to others, and that is part of the challenge in the game. There is also a section that tells you how close the nearest border is to your closest guess, in case you think more in kilometers than just staring at the globe.
In all, Globle is a different take on these kinds of games in that there is clearly a more visual element to it than just guessing words with clues around different letters. Educationally, this offers a bit more context and could even be used in classrooms for basic geography instruction.
OTHER GAMES LIKE GLOBLE AND WORDLE
Though Wordle started the fad, and Globle has picked up along the same mechanics, there are many other games that have cropped up here over the last year. In the word sphere, there are ones like Octordle which is much like Wordle except there are eight words to guess instead of just one. And this game also offers a sequence version of play that has word guesses in succession. Plus there is Qwordle which follows much of the same rules as the original but offers two words at once and employs a version of quantum mechanics to the whole thing.
If looking for non-word-related games we have Heardle which was acquired by Spotify and offers a chance each day to guess a particular song and artist. The game is played by getting clips of the song starting with the first couple of seconds and move up with each guess. And there’s also Foodle which is just what it sounds like, a chance to guess a new food every single day.
It would be easy to think that we have seen the full scope of games spawned by Wordle over the last year, but new ones are always cropping up and it’s easy to see why. The daily nature and the universal guess element do add fun wrinkles that keep you coming back every 24 hours.
