What Is Heardle? The Wordle Alternative for Music Lovers, Explained.

The New York Times has really hit its stride as a game studio on the side. All the buzz began with Spelling Bee, and its newest game, Wordle, has been the talk of the town—at least, amongst anyone who enjoys that sort of thing with their morning coffee.

But for those who would prefer something that stimulates their ears more than their vocabulary chops, there’s a pretty neat alternative game—and it doesn’t even require a subscription of any kind. Here’s everything you need to know about Heardle, the “daily musical intros game.”

How to play

Much like Wordle, Heardle gives the player a handful of guesses to win the game, but since the player is guessing a song, the mechanics are obviously a little different from Wordle’s system of color-coded letters. Instead of hammering out a random word and seeing where it takes you, Heardle players listen to the opening seconds of a song and guess from there. Depending on the song, you might get a drum beat, a fade-in, or even ambient sounds—therefore, you have to really know and love the song in question to be able to get it on the first try.

You start with only a very small snippet and add seconds as needed by skipping guesses, and the game won’t penalize you for reaching your max allotted time, but the time will only go so far, depending on the song. Thankfully, players won’t be guessing completely blind: There’s a search box full of every song in the game. If you have an inkling of what the song is, you need only type it in the box and see if it comes up.

And to anyone who might feel dismayed by their lack of popular-music knowledge, don’t despair: The catalogue is actually quite impressive! I couldn’t guess it the first time I played, and I can’t even remember the answer, which was so out of my realm of knowledge. But the next day, I got it right away as “Blur: Song 2.” It’s a fun way to test out your knowledge of all the music out there, and it might be a great opportunity for the musically-curious to explore other genres, too.

Buy them a coffee?

Heardle was initially created as a little game between friends, who had no idea it would blow up as much as it did. Now, millions of people play it every day—music nerds like you and me. But because it’s not funded like the NYT’s games are, they rely on donations to improve the game piece by piece.

If you like the game and want to support it, you can donate to them on ko-fi! Indie devs need all the help they can get, especially in the early stages of release.

(featured image: Heardle)