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…)
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):
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.
![A notebook is held in front of terminal output. The terminal begins with 'Start position: [0,4]' and then shows a series of 5×5 grids containing numbers: one, labelled 'Route:', shows random grid of the numbers 0 through 24; the second, labelled 'Puzzle:', contains 1s, 2s, and 3s, corresponding perhaps to the orthagonal distances between consecutive numbers from the first grid; the third, whose title is obscured by the notebook, shows the same thing again but with 'walls' drawn in ASCII art between some of the numbers. The notebook in front contains hand-drawn sketches of similar grids with arrows "jumping" around between them.](/_q23u/2025/03/20250313_100059-640x487.jpg)
