Crazy Phrase

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2022

It's no secret that Wordle has taken the world by storm in early 2022. It's reportedly been played by millions of people and many of them share their results with friends every day. The game has an elegant simplicity that I find very appealing. I also love the idea of everyone in the world working on the same daily puzzle. It's a lovely example of how a simple digital task can, in some small limited way, build connection and community.

It was evident from the beginning that the simplicity of the game makes it a great starting point for variations. There has been an explosion of games based on the core idea. Here is a list of 67 Games Like Wordle to Play.

I have built one more to throw into the mix. It's called Crazy Phrase and it is available now to play for free. Anyone who has played the original Wordle will find the rules very familiar. Basically, you guess a phrase instead of a single 5 letter word, and there is a new clue color - blue means the letter is present in a different word. Here is a simple example below.



The main difficulty in Wordle is trying to think of words that give you as much information as possible. In Crazy Phrase the words can be very long and for myself, and I suspect many other people, it is very hard to think of long words with specific letters in particular locations. To combat this I chose to relax the requirement that every letter slot needs to be filled. You can leave slots blank and use 2 or more words to fill a one word field. You just need to leave at least one space between words as you would expect. Here is an example of what I mean:



Thank you to Josh Wardle for creating the original game. Thank you also to Jason Davies for creating this implementation of Bloom filters which I used to efficiently do checking of valid words. Thanks also to my family members who have been trying it out for me and Doug Peterson for early use and promotion.

If you enjoy word games then please give Crazy Phrase a try!

 


GifBuilder
Blog
Tileable Animations