Don’t have time to read? Just start playing:
There’s a Wordle clone for everybody
Am I too late to get onto the “making Wordle clones” bandwagon? Probably; there are quite a few now, including:
- Hundreds of different languages,
- Entirely different word sets (swear words, slang, bird banding codes, posix commands, common passwords…),
- Different games in the same style (absurdle plays adversarially like my cheating hangman game, crosswordle involves reverse-engineering a wordle colour grid into a crossword, heardle is like Wordle but sounding out words using the IPA…)
- Twists on the idea (try guessing prime numbers, equations, countries, chess openings, chords, or the composition of parties of fantasy adventurers…)
- Just plain silly ones (horsle, easy wordle, chortle…)
Now, a Wordle clone for D&D players!
But you know what hasn’t been seen before today? A Wordle clone where you have to guess a creature from the Dungeons & Dragons (5e) Monster Manual by putting numeric values into a character sheet (STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHA):
What are you waiting for: go give DNDle a try (I pronounce it “dindle”, but you can pronounce it however you like). A new monster appears at 10:00 UTC each day.
And because it’s me, of course it’s open source and works offline.
The boring techy bit
- Like Wordle, everything happens in your browser: this is a “backendless” web application.
- I’ve used ReefJS for state management, because I wanted something I could throw together quickly but I didn’t want to drown myself (or my players) in a heavyweight monster library. If you’ve not used Reef before, you should give it a go: it’s basically like React but a tenth of the footprint.
- A cache-first/background-updating service worker means that it can run completely offline: you can install it to your homescreen in the same way as Wordle, but once you’ve visited it once it can work indefinitely even if you never go online again.
- I don’t like to use a buildchain that’s any more-complicated than is absolutely necessary, so the only development dependency is rollup. It resolves my
importstatements and bundles a single JS file for the browser.
Class
Hahahaha this is Awesome!!!
This is very niche but I like it. I haven’t run enough d&d to identify creatures by stat block but found it easier than mathle which I hate as much as I hate math.
My son DM’s a game every week – he’ll love this. I forwarded it to him.
Does knowledge of the MM help much with this? I haven’t played much and for me it was basically “guess 6 numbers with replacement”. What does the frequency distribution for each stat look like? Are they pretty flat?
Sapient creatures tend to have stats that are of similar magnitude: if several are “high”, it usually means the others are too: compare a Solar [26/22/26/25/25/30] (a kind of angelic being) to a Kobold [7/15/9/8/7/8]. DEX sometimes stands out in the case of small and nimble creatures (like the Kobold). Nonsapient animals tend to have STR/DEX/CON of a similar magnitude, but at least two of INT/WIS/CHA are usually lower (in prey animals, WIS is often high because they’re good at spotting movement; pack animals sometimes have high CHA), e.g. consider a Deer [11/16/11/2/14/5] exhibits middling STR/DEX/CON (with slightly elevated DEX because it’s nimble), low INT/CHA, and slightly-high WIS. Spotting patterns can be helpful early on; e.g. a good first guess might be something like 9/10/11/12/13/14; if you get some hits in the first three and zero or one of the last three boxes, you’re probably looking at an animal, which narrows down your guesses a bit.
I don’t think it’s as “smart” as a game with words, though!
If you’re interested in doing any frequency analysis or anything, though, here’s the source code file with the (JSON-ey) beastiary in it!
I’d already started hacking (I love open source)! Here’s the distribution:
https://codepen.io/sbliven/full/JjOMMYX
Good initial guesses might include 18/14/16/2/10/7, which maximizes your chance of gettting greens, and 15/14/13/10/12/11, which lowers the chance of getting greys. However, after watching the [3blue1brown video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v68zYyaEmEA&t=0s) I know that actually optimizing this would require some entropy calculations that I’m not going to do.
Thank you for doing this! Would love a link to the monster after through dndbeyond
“it’s basically like React but a tenth of the footprint”
theres preact too – https://preactjs.com/
Why isn’t this called Nerdle?
There’s already a Wordle-clone by that name.
The Dex on today’s monster seems to be a typo
Dan Q mentioned this article on danq.me.