Worldle, Semantle, Heardle, Nerdle

We've settled into a routine with Wordle and its clones, but some of the more radical variants are the most interesting. Our favourites are Worldle, Semantle, Heardle and Nerdle.

In Worldle you are presented with the outline of a country and have to guess what it is, wrong answers being guided by the direction and distance to the correct country. I try to use my memory and general knowledge, but when that fails Helen goes off to look at our world maps and she's learning quite a lot of geography from that. She also likes to explore the Google Maps (and Streetview) coverage of the country, and I try to give her some background history. ("British Indian Ocean Territory" is one of her favourites, so she knows about the Chagossian Islanders and the Diego Garcia military base.)

In Semantle you have to find a word based on meaning, with guesses ranked by semantic similarity. The first time we tried this was with the "stupidly difficult" target word "latter", and I got trapped in a local cluster around the Political Unification of India... This is good for both vocabulary building and spelling.

Heardle is a phonemic Wordle, a kind of "phonics for adults". We only do this occasionally, but it's been a good way to learn a little bit of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and to relearn the distinction between letters/graphemes and sounds/phonemes.

And Helen occasionally does Nerdle, which is a good challenge for her — sometimes it's too hard for her, which may be why she doesn't do it so often.