A new Wordle spinoff appears every few days and they’re getting more and more inventive. From the humble beginnings of Taylordle to the chaos of Octordle now emerges Heardle — a musical spinoff of the daily word guessing game that has you listening to a snippet of a song and guessing the track name.
How to Play Heardle
The rules are simple: you’ll listen to the intro of a song and try to guess what the song is. Every incorrect or skipped guess will unlock more of the song to help you identify it. You just have to guess the song correctly in six or fewer attempts. Easy! Right?
Not exactly. What makes Heardle challenging is how short the snippet of the song you get to listen to is. For your first guess, you’ll only hear the first second, and you only unlock a few extra seconds for every subsequent guess. At least you can listen to it as many times as you like before making your guess.
The songs are randomly pulled from a list of the most streamed songs of the past decade, which is great if you’re familiar with all of the biggest hits but can get quite tricky if you don’t listen to a particular artist. Then again, even people who don’t listen to Kanye probably recognise the iconic opening of “Black Skinhead”, which was yesterday’s Heardle solution.
The only classic Wordle element missing is the yellow square to indicate a correct letter in the wrong spot. Heardle won’t tell you if you guess the correct artist but the wrong song, so you’d better be sure you’ve got the right track before you make a guess.
There’s a new Heardle every day, but you can fill your time before the next song by challenging your friends to multiplayer Wordle, solving any old Wordles you missed from the archive or by playing other great puzzle games like The Witness and Unpacking.
