A short history of -dle games, from Wordle to Liesofpdle

Before Wordle: guessing games with feedback

Guessing a hidden answer from structured feedback is much older than the web. In Jotto, a pen-and-paper game from 1955, two players try to guess each other's secret word. The television game show Lingo turned the same principle into a contest in which players learned which letters were in the right place. The board game Mastermind did it with colored pegs instead of letters. Wordle's mechanic belongs to that lineage. What it added was the packaging: one puzzle a day, the same for everyone, and an easy way to share the result.

Wordle, a gift that went viral

Josh Wardle, a software engineer based in Brooklyn, built Wordle for his partner, Palak Shah, who loved word games. The rules fit in one sentence: find a five-letter word in six tries, with colored tiles showing which letters are correct, misplaced or absent. After the couple had played it for months, and after it had become a fixture of his family's group chat, Wardle released it to the public in October 2021.

Growth was slow at first. According to The New York Times, the game had 90 players on November 1, 2021, and around 300,000 two months later. The turning point came in December 2021, when Wardle added a Share button. It produced a grid of colored squares that showed how a game had gone without revealing the word, an idea borrowed from a group of players in New Zealand who had started posting their results that way. The grids spread across Twitter at the end of December, and Wordle became a phenomenon.

On January 31, 2022, The New York Times announced it had bought Wordle for a price “in the low seven figures”. The game has lived on the newspaper's puzzle pages ever since.

2022, the year of the -dle

Wordle's format was easy to adapt, and imitations and tributes appeared within weeks. A few of them stood out:

• Worldle, released in January 2022 by French developer Antoine Teuf, asks you to name a country or territory from its silhouette. Each wrong guess shows the distance and direction to the answer. More than 500,000 people were playing it two weeks after launch.
• Quordle, created by Freddie Meyer in early 2022, makes you solve four Wordle grids at once in nine tries. Merriam-Webster bought it in January 2023.
• Heardle, launched in February 2022, plays the opening of a song in snippets that grow from one to sixteen seconds. Spotify acquired it in July 2022 and shut it down the following year.
• LoLdle, released in mid-2022 by a League of Legends fan, brought the format to video games, with five daily puzzles about the game's champions. Its Classic mode compares attributes such as gender, role, region and release year: the grid of colored cells that many later fan games adopted.

The suffix became a label of its own. A name ending in “-dle” now tells players what to expect: one puzzle a day, the same for everyone, and a result worth comparing.

Why the format works

A handful of design choices explain why these games stuck where so many puzzle apps fade:

• One puzzle a day. You cannot binge it, so you come back tomorrow, and the game turns into a small daily ritual.
• The same puzzle for everyone. Your score means something to your friends because they faced exactly the same challenge, which gives everyone something to talk about.
• Every guess teaches you something. A wrong answer is never wasted: it narrows the field, so progress feels constant.
• Short sessions. A game takes a few minutes, the length of a coffee break or a bus ride.
• A result you can show. Wordle's grid let people share a performance without spoiling the puzzle, and every shared grid worked as free advertising.

Fan-made -dle games add one more ingredient: they test what you know about a world you already love. Recognizing a boss from its weakness and chapter, or a weapon from its icon, is a way of proving how much time you have spent in that world.

How Liesofpdle adapts the formula

Liesofpdle applies these ideas to Lies of P, the soulslike inspired by Pinocchio that Round8 Studio developed and NEOWIZ published in September 2023, set in the Belle Époque city of Krat. Its choices follow from that heritage:

• Five modes instead of one. The Boss and Legion Arm modes use the attribute grid popularized by LoLdle. Weapondle and Amuldle are image puzzles built on the game's own icons, and Quotedle asks you to recognize a character from a single line.
• Data from the game itself. Names, stats, icons and lines come from the files of version 1.12.0.0 of the game, including the Overture DLC, a prequel released in June 2025. Names appear exactly as the game translates them in each of the twelve supported languages.
• No fail state. Instead of Wordle's six tries, you can guess as many times as you need, and your score is the number of tries. Players who have not finished Lies of P can still reach the answer.
• An answer kept on the server. The original Wordle shipped its whole list of answers inside the page's code, where curious players soon found them. Liesofpdle computes and checks the answer on its server instead, so the page never contains it.
• A share text that names the answer. Unlike Wordle's grid, Liesofpdle's share text includes the name of the answer, so wait until your friends have played before posting it.

The daily puzzle explained covers the technical side, and how to play walks through the rules of each mode.