Capitalizing off the overnight success of Wordle, Southern Baptists have launched their own daily word game.
Amid the lead-up to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in June, the SBC Executive Committee has released a website modeled after Wordle, the viral word-guessing game so successful The New York Times purchased it from its creator for a seven-figure price.
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“We’re always looking for unique ways to promote engagement around the annual meeting,” Jonathan Howe, executive vice president of communications for the SBC Executive Committee, told the Baptist Press. “The Wordle craze is a perfect avenue for us to engage with Southern Baptists on a daily basis while having some fun in the process.”
Much like Wordle, currently available for free on The Times’ website, players have six tries at guessing the correct five-letter word of the day. In the SBC version, the letters are gray if they are not in the correct word, yellow if they are but are currently in the wrong place, and blue if they are both in the word and in the correct position.
Initially a joke, Howe said he first presented the idea of a Baptist Wordle knock-off on “SBC This Week,” the podcast he hosts with Amy Whitfield. After mentioning it, he contacted Patrick Watts, a business information analyst at LifeWay Christian Resources, to see if it was even possible to recreate the guessing game.
Sure enough, it was.
After figuring out the technical side of recreating the game — which came about thanks to an open-source clone of the game and a programming language, React, that he was already acquainted with — Howe said the toughest part was coming up with a laundry list of words to use for the game, which restarts every 24 hours.
The game itself, Watts said, is unimportant. But it’s worth the time investment if it draws people to the SBC annual meeting, which will be held in Anaheim, California, from June 12-15.
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