DNDle (Wordle, but with D&D monster stats)

Don’t have time to read? Just start playing:

Play DNDle

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:

Screenshot showing a WhatsApp conversation. Somebody shares a Wordle-like "solution" board but it's got six columns, not five. A second person comments "Hang on a minute... that's not Wordle!"
I’m sure that by now all your social feeds are full of people playing Wordle. But the cool nerds are playing something new…

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):

Screenshot of DNDle, showing two guesses made already.
Just because nobody’s asking for a game doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make it anyway.

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 import statements and bundles a single JS file for the browser.

22 replies to DNDle (Wordle, but with D&D monster stats)

  1. 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!

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