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Redactle

One of the most recent hits to emerge from the Wordle-induced Cambrian explosion of indie guessing games is Redactle, a spinoff in which you guess the words in a redacted Wikipedia article. The "-dle" games just keep pouring in. At this point, someone could fit them all into some tangled taxonomy, charting the relationship between the world's Heardles and Worldles, Nerdles and Squabbles.

Redactle, like Semantle, is challenging. Give it a shot at your own risk. You'll be shown a Wikipedia article with so many redactions that it resembles the Mueller Report, and you'll be asked to guess words, any words. As you gradually identify previously redacted words, the article will become easier to understand. If you correctly guess the article's title, you win.

Each day's correct answer is derived from Wikipedia's 10,000 Vital Articles (Level 4). That means that articles like Greco-Roman wrestling, Algebraic topology, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are possibilities, but not List of classical music concerts with an unruly audience response or Bread dildo (yes, this is a real article).

When you play a word, a count of how many times it appears in the article — if it appears at all — appears on the right side of the screen. It's also revealed on the page, so you can start uncovering whole sentences and getting hints as to what else you should guess. You can also go to each instance by selecting a word from the list.

Things in categories appear to be the way to go, so I'll try that tomorrow to improve on my pathetic first attempt, which took me 130 guesses.

The Wordle aspect is minor, with the only similarities being that it is played online, is free, and only one is available per day. The latter point is critical, because I've squandered far too much of my life by going to a Wikipedia page about something as simple as London and then spending two hours reading about sloth gestation periods or whatever.

One game convinced me that I'll be playing it on a daily basis from now on, and that it'll join the ranks of our best Wordle alternatives, alongside Hurdle, Quordle, and Adverswordle. I will, however, wait until I have completed today's Wordle puzzle before moving on to this even more difficult puzzle.