Today I did my daily ritual of playing Wordle – which if you haven’t heard of it – it’s a word game where you try to guess a five-letter word in six tries. There’s a new word every day. What makes this game fun is that you can share your results – so you can humble brag when you get a word in three tries or even two – which I have done twice now.

The New York Times purchased Wordle for seven figures. So, yes, they spent over a million dollars for this viral word game. When a New York Times spokesperson mentioned the buy, they alluded that it was in the low seven-figure amount. Well, that’s practically a bargain price then if it was a low seven-figure number.

Wordle was a pet project of software engineer Josh Wardle that he actually started in 2013 but finished in 2021 launching it in October. I had heard that it was a quarantine project and immediately felt like an underachiever as my quarantine projects included such things as buying groceries, putting on real pants, and returning my Mom’s phone calls. These were my accomplishments while Josh is busy making a game that would make him a millionaire.

I told my husband that we need a million-dollar idea and he said that everyone has one. My problem is that I will never finish all of my projects and I bet one of those unfinished ones is my million-dollar idea. But this does give me encouragement to finish some projects no matter when it was started. It could still be a hit.

Some of my best ideas come to me while in the car. I had a great idea for a game that is similar to Wordle in that it has one puzzle a day. I would play it so I plan to do a proof of concept at least and see if any of my Facebook friends will play and give feedback.

Anyway, Wordle is still free for now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the NYT puts an extended version or something like that of the game behind their paywall. Keeping it free might be a really smart move as it will bring a bunch of web traffic and who knows – maybe convert some of it to readers.

Now I’m off to wait for tomorrow’s puzzle and to start on hopefully my million-dollar idea.