Wordle, the daily online word puzzle, stands apart from most online games primarily due to its simplicity. There’s a lot to love about the game created by software engineer Josh Wardle for his partner that has steadily gained players since its launch in October. What started as a creator’s pastime has exploded in popularity with more than 2 million regular puzzlers in just about three months.

Wordle gives you six chances to figure out a five-letter word. You simply type in a word in the top row of five boxes. Press enter to see if any of your letters appear in the target word. If the box turns gray, the letter is not in the word; if it turns yellow, the letter is in the word, but not in the right spot; and green indicates the letter is in the right spot. A neat array of the alphabet below the puzzle keeps track of each letter for you.

If you want to play, make sure you’re going to the right website — yes, you read that right, a website, not an app. Wordle can be found at powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle. Because of its popularity, there are a lot of copycats out there. I mentioned Wordle to my daughter, and she said that she had just started to play and was frustrated that she kept running out of time. She opened an app and began frantically rearranging sets of letters. “That’s not the real Wordle,” I said and sent her to the website. Wordle is not a high pressure activity, and that’s just one reason to like it.

There is no time limit. You can play at your own pace. If you close the tab on your computer or on your phone, your puzzle will still be there as long as you come back to it before a new puzzle is posted at midnight. You have a full 24 hours to complete it.

That leads me to the second reason to love Wordle. Because of the one-a-day format, you will never find yourself losing your sense of time, playing one game after another. It simply cannot become a time sink, instead, it’s a pleasant way to pass a few minutes of your day. Arianna Huffington last weekend tweeted, “Love that Josh Wardle deliberately created the game to be the opposite of the usual endlessly scrolling, attention-mining games and apps.”

While the words are common ones you use in everyday speech, the game requires you to think about common letter combinations and patterns, which makes for a thoughtful experience with just a dash of luck. If you find you’d like more of a challenge, you can turn on “harder” mode: any correct guesses whether or not they are in the right spot must be used in your subsequent try. It’s a nice balance for wordsmiths of all abilities.

Wordle lets you share your results by text or email, but that is not the objective of the game. In many free games, you’re inundated with opportunities to share your progress, your scores and if you earned a medal. A game developer’s objective is to expose more people and increase players, particularly if a game includes in-app purchases. When you share your Wordle results, all the recipient sees is a puzzle number, the tries it took you to solve it, along with a colored grid.

And in no particular order, Wordle has no ads, does not ask for any personal information to sign up and does not track you across the internet.

Now for a few quick tips. A letter can be used more than one time in a word, and you may encounter both U.S. and British spellings. Start with a word that has five different letters and ones that are most common. According to Lexicon, a site run by the publishers of the Oxford Dictionary, the most common letters in the English language are E, A, R, I, O. Of course you’ll have to work your way further down the list to make some words, but you get the idea. They also looked at the most common letters at the start of words and found the letter S was most frequently used because it has so many partners that form consonant clusters, like ST, SH and SC. E ranked in the middle of the pack. Beyond that, it’s really up to you. Some people use the same start word every time; others like to mix it up. Have fun!

Leslie Meredith has been writing about technology for more than a decade. As a mom of four, value, usefulness and online safety take priority. Have a question? Email Leslie at asklesliemeredith@gmail.com.

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