A collection of frequently asked questions about the Wordle-inpired football guessing game Worldiesle.
A new Worldiesle is available every day, at midnight UK time.
This game is inspired by Wordle, and similar projects that appeared in its wake such as Worldle and Heardle. Admittedly this site is launching a year after the hype for those games peaked, but nobody’s perfect.
Anyway - I’d wanted to make a football version of this game for a while, and figured guessing memorable goals from a series of screenshots fit the game pattern quite nicely.
In recent times - the phrase ‘worldie’ has been increasingly used in football to describe a “world-class” goal. Personally, I hate the phrase, but it formed a passable (awful) pun when combined with Wordle, so here we are. Sorry.
Currently, goals can come from the following tournaments:
We might expand this in future to more tournaments / leagues.
Also - it is probably fair to say Premier League, Champions League and the World Cup are the biggest source of goals.
We are currently limiting goals to those from 1990 to present, given the difficulty in finding good quality videos and stills for games prior to this. There is a bias towards recent years for similar reasons.
If you have been playing the game a while, you may notice that not all goals are ‘worldies’. I am largely picking goals based on their memorability - a very subjective measure that is unfortunately filtered through my own viewing memories and experiences - so all sorts of types of goal can sneak in. For instance, they may have just been a really important goal for the club or competition. They may just have been memorable because of the commentary surrounding them. Or because of the backstory leading up to them. Or they may have just been a bit silly and/or funny.
All in all, the fun of the game is not only in instantly recognising goals, but also in figuring them out from team kits, the make-up of the crowd, advertising hoardings, and so on. So if you don’t recognise a goal, just… start guessing
If you’d like to suggest new goals, feel free to contact me on Twitter.
New data is in the process of being imported into the site, and hopefully our internal database of players/teams will expand soon.
Rest assured, however: if the team/player you want to guess is not in the list, it will mean that it is not the correct answer anyway. Or that you spelt it wrong.
NOTE: Team and player guess MUST match an item in the dropdown lists, otherwise those guesses will be ignored. Please ensure you check your spelling very carefully - or better still make sure you select a suggestion from the list.
Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t k-
Sort of. For most games, it does. It’s an extra element of the quiz in remembering the goals, and I find it fun to try figure out the stadium from the images as well as anything else.
However, for most international matches (non-qualifier ones), and for some tournament matches (ie cup matches played on neutral grounds) the home/away team distinction doesn’t matter, and won’t be factored in to determining a correct guess.
OK, I’ll level with you: part of this game’s conception was in fact working backwards from the questionable pun in the title to a viable and workable game.
As much as I’d like to copy the good example of Wordle and Worldle by sprinkling past guesses with useful clues as to the correct answer, it’s a bit less clear how I’d do that when comparing teams and players (‘years’ I think works well - it’s a higher or lower type thing).
I’ll keep thinking of ways to improve this, and to see if the data is there to support it, but for now… please accept my apologies.
Your previous guesses and results are automatically saved on your device, but we do not currently have the ability to synchronise your stats across different device. We hope to offer this soon.
Not yet - but we hope to offer one soon. Or at least in the short-term we will soon support adding this website to your phone homescreen. I’ll likely include a little alert on the site when that feature is available.
Well done, he’s 13
No. Of course if you have a little coding knowledge it is quite easy to inspect the code of the site and see the answer, or upcoming pictures, or what have you. If you want to do that that’s fine - my thinking is that you’re only cheating yourself. 😇
Worldiesle is a small hobby project, and the code is public over on Github if you want to check it out. Although please don’t rip me off.
At the moment, the best way to contact me is via Twitter. Any feedback is gratefully received.
The best way to support us is to keep playing the game, and share it (and your results) with your friends and family!
However, if you’d like to go further and chuck me a few quid for server costs (or just - I dunno - a treat?) you can do so on ko-fi.com/worldiesle. Thanks!