37 - The Math Puzzle › How the math Wordle was born
How the math Wordle was born
In January 2022, a London data scientist and his teenage daughter were in the car talking about why Wordle worked so well for word people and had nothing to offer number people. Three days later Nerdle existed, and a whole category came with it.
Wordle first
Wordle arrived in late 2021 and did something clever: one puzzle a day, the same for everyone, then it stops. No feed, no levels, no lives to buy. Just a small shared thing you could compare with a friend.
Then the car journey
Richard Mann, a data scientist in London, was driving with his daughter Imogen. They got talking about why there was no Wordle for people who liked numbers more than words. He sketched the idea that evening, developer Marcus Tettmar built it, and Nerdle launched on 20 January 2022.
Within three weeks it had more than a million players across over 200 countries. Maths teachers picked it up almost immediately as a warm-up activity, which is not something most games can say in their first month.
What actually spread it
Not advertising. People screenshotting their coloured grid and sending it to a friend, a partner, a group chat. The press coverage came afterwards, because journalists noticed a thing people were already sharing.
Where things stand now
There is a small, healthy category of daily number puzzles. Nerdle and Mathler hide an equation and ask you to deduce it. 37 - The Math Puzzle goes the other way: nothing is hidden, you get seven dice, and you build an equation that lands on exactly 37. Usually there is more than one right answer.
Plenty of people play more than one. They scratch related but different itches, and none of them takes more than a few minutes.
Credit where it belongs: Nerdle made this category exist. If you have never tried a math Wordle, it is a perfectly good place to start.