Apparently, no one is bored of word games yet, and that's fine by us. We're huge fans of Wordle and all of its clever spin-off games. The newest variant to enter the arena is Periodle, and we're crossing our fingers we remember that semester of Chemistry we took back in freshman year.
Periodle has players use the abbreviated elements of the periodic table to spell out words, instead of just using the plain old boring alphabet. For those of us who don't have that memorized, the game does have the whole beast there, right where the "regular" keyboard would be in Wordle and some of its variants, like Waffle and Quordle.
Otherwise, the game works pretty much the same as the others do. You have one word to guess that'll be spelled from any five elements on the table, and a limited number of guesses to try and solve it in (eight for this one, instead of Wordle's six). It also follows the color convention of showing which letters (elements) are in the correct place, which are in the word but in the wrong place, and which don't appear in that day's word at all.
What's different, however, is that since some elemental abbreviations are two letters (instead of one), any given day's puzzle solution can contain anywhere from five to ten letters total. While most of us have become increasingly familiar with possible five-letter words, thanks to Wordle, now we'll need to brush up on longer words now.
Periodle also ups the difficulty by throwing another mechanic into the mix---orange letters. When an element is highlighted orange, that means that it is contained in the solution word but that the element itself doesn't not appear in the solution. As you can see in the image below, the first guess, "Piracy," and the guessed elements---"P," "I," and "Ra"---all contain letters in the solution word. Those specific elements are ultimately incorrect, though, as the solution is "Practical."
This mechanic makes the game way more challenging than most other Wordle alternatives out there (and no, you don't actually need to know anything about Chemistry in order to solve the clever puzzle). If you have feedback for the game's developer, or want to chat with other players, there is a Periodle Discord server you can join. It also tracks your stats each day, so you can see your progress every day that you play.