Chengyu Wordle

Wordle, for Chinese idioms - 成语 (chéngyǔ)

Guess the idiom in 6 tries.

This is my attempt at recreating Wordle, made by Josh Wardle, from scratch.

Screenshot

Story

I play Wordle sometimes and thought that it's pretty cool. Personally I don't find the Wordle braggings useful. They kind of pollute the social media timelines (Facebook, Twitter) but at least they're better than ads 🔥🤷‍♂️.

Then, I came across few "forks" of Wordle:

Primel, by David Lawrence - guess a 5 digit prime number.
Katla, by Fatih Kalifa - Wordle, in Indonesian language.
Thwordle, by Manassarn Manoonchai - Wordle, in Thai language.
Katapat, by Eugene Low - Wordle, in Bahasa Malaysia.

I'm like, "Hey, that's pretty cool, but maybe I could try something else?".

One day, I tweeted:

Wordle, but for Chinese idioms.

#idea

This is timely, because Chinese New Year is coming up.

I looked up some data from the Googleverse and realised this is kind of doable. It's actually a bit difficult for me to build this because I can't actually read or write Chinese. But heck, who cares, buidling a game is fun.

Media coverage

10 Feb 2022: AsiaOne - Want more Wordle? Here are 13 spin-offs to try, including a Singlish version
4 Feb 2022: Mothership - PM Lee says Wordle a fun way to keep the mind engaged, recommends Chinese & Malay versions
4 Feb 2022: 8world Entertainment Lifestyle - 全世界都在Wordle！快试试数字版Nerdle
3 Feb 2022: Lee Hsien Loong - ...I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that there are Chinese and Malay versions of the game. Give it a go — a simple but fun way to keep the mind engaged.
2 Feb 2022: Kotaku - A Sensational Wordle Clone Without Any Actual Words
30 Jan 2022: Sixth Tone - Wordle-Like Games Slowly Gain Traction on Chinese Social Media
30 Jan 2022: 6種英文和中文的 Wordle 猜字遊戲打發時間真好用

Technicalities

Tech

This game is built with these wonderful technologies:

Node.js 14+ (with ESM support)
Vite
Preact

Commands:

npm i - install dependencies
npm run dev - start a development server

Notes:

"Unique" IDs are generated for every idiom. They are not 100% unique and are generated with shorthash2. I've tested using this and it's definitely possible to get the same hash for different idioms, if it's used to generate hashes for ALL idioms. Now it's only used for high-frequency idioms (smaller list).
Generated "keys" for the keyboard are not guaranteed to be persistent for every idiom. They are dynamically generated based on the list of idioms. So if the list of idioms or the order of the idioms changes, the keys will change. This will affect the shared results with emojis (🟩🟧⬜).
It's possible to fork this and change all idioms.

Data

⚠️ If you don't want to be spoiled, avoid reading the data marked with 🚨SPOILERS🚨.

Raw data stored in data/.

List of idioms from pwxcoo/chinese-xinhua via wenhuangzeng/chinese-idiom-chengyu.
🚨SPOILERS🚨 List of high-frequency idioms from THUOCL (THU Open Chinese Lexicon). I discovered this via AllanChain/chinese-wordle. GitHub repo: thunlp/THUOCL

Game data stored in game-data/ are processed by running npm run data, which produces two files:

all-idioms.txt - list of all idioms, one per line.
🚨SPOILERS🚨 game-idioms.csv - list of idioms to be used in the game, with assigned "unique" id. This list is mainly from THUOCL's high-frequency idioms.