The word game that has taken the world by storm, Wordle, now has a pilot-friendly version with the clever name of Airportle (adding that to our spell-checker now). Instead of the now-familiar five-letter format of the original, Airportle sticks to just three, all of which are airport IDs. We tried today’s and failed miserably, despite what we thought were some brilliant guesses. Try your hand at it, and no spoilers from us.
The game itself is put out there by Scott’s Cheap Flights, and they call it a “fork” of the open source Wordle game. The original, which you can find here, was written by a Welsh-born New York City-based software engineer named Josh Wardle, who made it on a lark for his partner. At first, only a few players were on the game each day. But from its launch in November until, well, a few days ago, its popularity has skyrocketed. The latest number we saw was 3 million, and we’re certain that number is already wildly low.
Airportle is pretty much the same game, but instead of a huge bank of five-letter English words to draw from, you get the ICAO three-letter airport identifier bank to play with. Just like its progenitor game, Airportle gives you six guesses to figure out the airport code. If you get a letter right but in the wrong place, the square turns yellow. The correct letter in the correct space makes it green. Fair warning, six guesses can come pretty fast! Good luck and have fun!
