Shordle vs Wordle

What the two games share

Wordle is the daily word puzzle from The New York Times. Shordle is not made by or affiliated with the Times, but it is built on the same idea, so if you already play Wordle most of Shordle will feel familiar from the first guess.

Both games give everyone the same secret five-letter word each day. Both give you six guesses to find it. Both colour each tile after a guess using the same system:

• A Green means the letter is correct and in the right position.
• B Yellow means the letter is in the word but in a different position.
• C Gray means the letter is not in the word at all.

And both let you share a spoiler-free grid of your result so friends can see how you did without learning the answer. So far, so familiar. The rules that decide a correct guess are the same. What changes is everything around the guess.

That shared base matters more than it sounds. It means the skills you build in one game carry straight into the other: how you spread vowels across an opener, how you read a yellow tile as a hint about position, and how you avoid wasting a turn repeating a gray letter. If you can solve Wordle, you already know how to solve the word in Shordle. The only new thing to learn is how to find the letters in the first place.

What Shordle changes

In Wordle the board is fully lit. You can read all five tiles and your past guesses at a glance, take as long as you like, and think in calm silence. Shordle keeps the guessing identical but takes the light away.

The Shordle board starts in near-total darkness. You reveal the five hidden letters with a flashlight: on a desktop your cursor is the beam, and on a phone or tablet you drag your finger or, if you turn it on, tilt the device using the gyroscope. The light only shows a small area at a time, so you have to choose where to look. This is the heart of being a word game in the dark.

On top of that, Shordle runs a 60-second battery. It drains while you play and drains faster when the light is moving, so wild sweeps across the board cost you more time than short, deliberate looks. Wordle has no clock, so the timer is the clearest single difference between the two.

Shordle is also an installable progressive web app that works offline. You can add it to your home screen and play with no connection, no account, and no download. Wordle is played on the Times site and app instead.

Side-by-side comparison

Here is how the two games line up feature by feature. Where a row says they match, it really does match.

For the longer reasoning behind any single guess, the same advice carries across both games. Our word game strategy guide covers openers, reading feedback, and lowering your average.

Is Shordle harder than Wordle?

For most people, yes, and on purpose. The puzzle logic is the same, but in Shordle you have to find the letters before you can even start reasoning about them, and the battery means you cannot stall. The pressure comes from the dark and the clock, not from a meaner word list.

If you are coming from Wordle and want the difficulty to land softly, the same opening-word thinking still applies. A first guess that spends common letters early is worth even more when light and time are scarce, which is why Shordle plays well alongside our strategy guide.

It is worth being clear about where the difficulty does not come from. Shordle does not use a harder dictionary or a sneakier answer than a standard daily puzzle, and it does not add extra guesses or hidden penalties. The challenge is purely the darkness and the battery. Once you have lit up all five tiles, the deduction you do from there is exactly the deduction you would do in Wordle. That is also why the early guesses, when the board still has unknown letters to find, feel the most tense, and why later guesses can feel calmer as more of the board stays lit in your memory.

Which should you play?

They are not really rivals, and many people play both. Pick by the mood you are in.

Play Wordle if you want the calm, unhurried classic: a clear board, no clock, and time to think. It is the cleanest version of the five-letter daily puzzle and a great place to learn the format.

Play Shordle if you want a harder, more atmospheric, timed twist on that same puzzle. The dark board and the 60-second battery turn a quiet logic game into something tense and tactile. If that appeals, start with how to play Shordle, and if you are browsing the wider field, our Wordle alternatives roundup covers other daily word games worth a look.