README

Wordzel

A Wordle-style word game for kids - with a great deal of poop.

Wordle + Hazel = Wordzel. Made for Hazel, who discovered that the best thing to guess in Wordle is FARTS, and the second best is POOPS.

Download

Grab the latest from the releases page:

• Windows - unzip and run wordzel.exe.
• Linux - untar and run ./wordzel.

It is one file with everything inside, sounds included. Nothing to install.

How to play

Guess the secret word. After each guess the tiles turn green for the right letter in the right spot, yellow for a letter that is in the word somewhere else, and gray for a letter that is not in it at all. The keyboard colors itself to match.

• Pick a level - from Easy (3 letters, 4 tries) up to Insane (9 letters, 10 tries).
• Make up your own secret word for someone else to guess - any letters, any length, real word or not.
• Look up a word - hold a finger on a row, or right-click it, to see what the word means before you spend a turn on it.
• Race the hourglass if you like - by level, a few minutes, or your own time.
• Guess a potty word - POOPS, FARTS, TOILET, PLUNGER and about two hundred more - and see what happens.

It works with a mouse, a keyboard or a finger, on a phone-sized window or a big screen.

Play together

The game can host a web version for the whole house, with a family leaderboard:

1. On the computer that will host, open ☰ and set your Player name, a Family passphrase and a Server port, then switch on Run family server.
2. On any phone, tablet or computer at home, open http://<that computer's address>:<port> - for example http://192.168.1.10:8181.
3. Type the family passphrase, then pick your name from the list or add a new one. Each device remembers both; tap your name at the top to hand the device to someone else.

Every finished game counts toward the daily and monthly leaderboard: a win scores more the longer the word and the fewer the guesses, and a loss still scores a point, so playing a lot pays off. Keep the server on your own home network.

A server that stays on

wordzel-server is the same family server with no window, for a machine that is always running. Build wordzel-server.lpi (after wordzel.lpi, which makes the resource file both share), then give it a folder holding a wordzel.ini:

[family]
passphrase=pick something long
port=8080

and start it with wordzel-server --config=/path/to/that/folder. Scores are kept in family/ beside the ini. Without --config it uses the game's own settings. It has no TLS of its own, so put a proxy that adds HTTPS in front of it before letting the internet in.

Building it yourself

Open wordzel.lpi in Lazarus and press F9. The headless server is wordzel-server.lpi.

Credits

• The secret words are chosen with help from the FrequencyWords English list by Hermit Dave, built from the OpenSubtitles2018 corpus and licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Word definitions come from Wiktionary, with Free Dictionary API as a fallback.

License

0BSD - do whatever you want with it.