Amordle: the Lichess of Wordle

Why I built it

For years, my family and I played the daily Wordle and Hurdle puzzles every night, and we had lots of fun doing so. But every game has its limitations. Eventually, the problems with Wordle and Hurdle began to detract from the gameplay experience.

Wordle is unmistakably a commercial product, and virtually everything that can be paywalled in Wordle is. I understand that the game has to make money somehow, but when the average player spends more time on watching ads than on playing the actual game, the product is no longer a game that happens to have advertisements in it – it’s an advertisement that happens to have a game in it. The only free way to play without being overwhelmed by ads is in airplane mode, which is a minor inconvenience for me but perhaps a major one for someone else.

For a game as simple as Wordle, players should not need to pay to play. As of August 2026, a Wordler wanting an ad-free experience in the official game must buy a New York Times Games subscription, which is $6.99 per month or $49.99 per year. That’s right: to remove ads, you have to pay for a subscription. Not just a one-time fee. A recurring payment. That is absurd.

Wordle is an extremely easy game to vibe code, and there are plenty of AI subscription plans that cost under $49.99 per month. Pick a good one, pay for only one month, and make your own Wordle without ads. Or, just play Amordle, and never see a Wordle ad again.

Hurdle isn’t much better, either. Originally by Arkadium, the game itself is a bit more complicated than classic Wordle, but the app/product is notably simpler: no practice mode (only daily puzzles), no way to unlock past dailies, no in-game consumables, no player histories, etc. Oh, and it still has ads, although there is a way to play with an ad blocker.

As with Wordle, Hurdle can absolutely be vibe coded in short order. Or, you can play Amordle.

And there are many valuable features missing from both games:

• No word list transparency: Neither NYT nor Arkadium posts an official list of all words used by their game.
• No customization: Players can’t choose their own word lengths, word list difficulties, puzzle counts (for Hurdle), keyboard colors, custom account avatar images, etc.
• No multiplayer: Wordle and Hurdle are strictly solo-only games, making play with friends and family harder than it needs to be, and precluding competitive ranked matchmaking altogether.

To solve all these problems, I created Amordle – the Lichess of Wordle.

The rules

There are two modes. Both use the same marking rule.

OG

OG is Wordle, upgraded. One puzzle, one answer, one colored tile per guess letter:

• Green (✓) — the letter is in the word, in that position.
• Yellow (~) — the letter is in the word, somewhere else.
• Dark (×) — the letter is not in the word.

If a guess has more copies of a letter than the answer contains, the extras are marked dark. That rule is the one people get wrong, so there is a demo for it below.

GO chains

GO is Hurdle, upgraded: the same game, but as a chain of puzzles. Five, seven, or ten of them, and always five for the Daily. The catch is that each answer you solve carries forward as a guess in the next puzzle, so you never start a chain puzzle from nothing — you start it holding evidence you earned.

Practice and Daily

Practice is where the customization lives: 2 to 35 letters, three nested difficulties, and optional Hard Mode. Play as much of it as you want.

Daily is one puzzle a day, five letters, the same word for everybody. The Solo Daily rolls over at your local midnight. The ranked COMBAT Daily uses UTC instead, so that a ranked match is the same puzzle at the same moment everywhere.

Finishing either Daily keeps your streak — OG or GO, and finishing counts rather than winning. A Daily you lose still keeps it.

Hard Mode

Optional, and the same as it is in Wordle and Hurdle. Every clue becomes binding:

• Green letters have to stay where they are.
• Yellow letters have to appear at least as often as the evidence shows.
• Dark letters have to be avoided when they are ruled out entirely.

Try the marking rule

Every tile answers one question about one letter. The part people get wrong is what happens when a guess repeats a letter more often than the answer does, so the answer here is fixed and you can type at it.

The marking happens in two passes. First every letter sitting in the right position turns green and uses up that copy of the letter. Then whatever is left over is matched from left to right against the copies still unspoken for. That is why SASSY against SENSE gives you two greens and then a dark S: the answer has two S's, both of them already claimed, so the third copy has nothing left to earn.

COMBAT and ranked play

COMBAT is Amordle against another person. You share one board and take turns: you guess, they guess, and both of you read the same evidence. Refreshing never spends a turn, and a rejected guess changes nothing.

You can play a public match against whoever is queued, or send a private challenge to a specific player. Practice matches are unranked. Ranked matches move your Elo.

Rather than merging all ratings into one average Elo, Amordle keeps them in separate pools. A rating only means something when everyone holding it played the same game, and a forty-five minute match and a one-minute match ask for different skills — a rating that mixed them would describe neither. So each combination keeps its own.

10 clocks × 2 game modes (OG/GO) × 2 Hard mode options (on/off) = 40 game combinations.

Plus one for each of the two ranked Daily modes. Your rating in one says nothing about your rating in another, and you can be provisional in one while established in another.

A new rating starts at 1200 and is marked provisional until you have played ten games in that pool, during which it moves further and faster so it can find your level quickly.

Transparent scoring

A rating is only worth having if you believe it. So the game publishes the arithmetic: the methodology page gives the expected-score equation, both K factors, the rating pools, the experience formula, the level curve, and what every coin costs. Every number on that page is read out of the code that runs, and the page names the file and line each one comes from.

That page exists for the moment your rating goes down. Losing points is the point at which "the system is rigged" is easiest to believe and hardest to disprove, and the honest answer is to show the equation rather than ask to be trusted.

Coins and tools

Coins are earned by playing and cannot be bought. There is no shop, no currency pack, and nothing behind a payment. That is deliberate: the moment you can buy an advantage, a rating stops meaning anything.

What you can spend them on:

• Reveal one letter — 25 coins. Places a letter in your draft row.
• Remove wrong letters — 40 coins. Rules five letters off the keyboard.
• Unlock a past Daily — 60 coins. Opens a date you missed.
• Another guess — a computed price. Adds exactly one attempt in Practice, and gets more expensive each time you do it.

These are Solo tools. None of them exist in COMBAT, ranked or not — there is no version of a match where one player can spend their way to an advantage. Unlocking a past Daily also cannot repair a broken streak: the streak only ever moves forward.

Where the words come from

Every word comes from the English OpenList, an open dataset of all Scrabble-valid (and Wordle-valid) English words that I also built. It is published in full, so the vocabulary this game draws on can be inspected rather than simply taken on trust.

It is also the reason the game can offer 2 to 35 letters at all. Most word games ship a hand-curated list of a few thousand five-letter words, and that list is the ceiling. Start from the largest Scrabble-compatible English word list instead, and no valid English word is off-limits — the game can just ask for a 19-letter answer at standard difficulty and get one.

Accessibility and privacy

The game targets WCAG 2.2 AA. It works by keyboard and by touch, respects reduced motion and forced colors, and keeps your public player identity separate from your private account data. Spectators cannot see private requests, hidden answers, or anything that would change a match. Guest progress stays separate when you sign in.

Play it

amordle.vercel.app. You can play Solo without an account. Signing in is what adds ranked COMBAT, a rating, coins, and a Daily streak.

Updates get written up as they ship, with a short video when the change is something you can see, in the Amordle changelog. Bugs and feature requests go to GitHub issues.

What comes next

The next companion piece will be a longer, manually recorded tutorial: a full game of each mode start to finish, a ranked COMBAT match against a real opponent, and a walk through the methodology page so the rating math is visible rather than described. The placeholder below will be replaced when that video is ready.