Recreating POELTL, the Wordle Equivalent for NBA Players

april 2022

Introduction

The past few months have seen a spike in word game popularity, evidently originating out of Wordle, a game where you are given six chances to guess a five-letter word. Not long after, Dunktown gave us POELTL, a game where you guess an NBA player based on team, conference, division, position, height, age, and jersey number (be careful, it’s harder than it seems).

Wordle vs POELTL

The screenshot to the right shows a sample Wordle game. The first guess contains two correct letters in the correct position (green), two incorrect letters (gray), and one correct letter in the incorrect position (yellow). This user took four guesses to complete the game.

The screenshot to the left shows a sample POELTL game. The first guessed player has the same position, height, and age of the mystery player, and the second guessed player is in the same conference and division as the mystery player in addition to being a partial match for position and having the same age. It can also be observed that the attributes which are numbers indicate if the mystery player is higher or lower than the guessed player. This user took three guesses to complete the game.

The original POELTL only features one NBA player every day, but my recreation of POELTL offers unlimited practice at guessing NBA players.

The green/yellow/gray system works analogously with pluses, checks, and minuses to signify correct, partial, or incorrect guesses.

There are two additional edits, all-star mode (non all-stars are excluded) and easy mode (only eligible players can be guessed).