Josh Wardle's 2021 daily puzzle game Wordle sparked two booms. Millions of people were hooked on playing Wordle, and thousands of developers were hooked on creating games like Wordle: Nerdle (Wordle for math), Worldle (Wordle for geography), Heardle (Wordle for music ), and even variations like Taylordle (Wordle for Taylor Swift fans) soon appeared.

In addition to clever adaptations of the Wordle formula, there are also many Wordle-alikes that are mere clones, offering nearly the same Wordle experience without variations (like Infinite Wordle, a Wordle that can be played multiple times a day The New York Times, which purchased Wordle from Wardle in 2022, is currently cracking down on a bunch of these Wordle-alikes.

As reported by Jason Koebler in 404, the New York Times filed a DMCA notice against Chase Wackerfuss, a coder who created a Wordle clone called Reactle and posted the code on GitHub. The DMCA notice was directed not only at Reactle, but also at all Wordle clones "forked" from the open source Reactle repository, which number some 1,900 forks.

This is the number of games covered by a single DMCA notice. Apparently, it even includes clones where the answer to the daily puzzle is always "CHUNK."

"The Times Wordle copyright includes unique elements of the immensely popular game, including a 5x6 grid, green tiles that indicate correct guesses, yellow tiles that indicate the correct letter but the wrong place in the word, and a keyboard directly below the grid," the DMCA The notice states.

"This gameplay has been copied exactly to the repository and the owner is teaching others how to copy this game to create the same word game.

"I have reviewed dozens of forked repositories," the DMCA notice continues." Based on the representative number of forks I have reviewed, I believe that all or most of the forks infringe to the same degree as the parent repository."

This is not a DMCA notice.

This is not the first time the NYT has targeted Wordle clones; according to 404, two more GitHub repositories were DMCA'd in January.

"To me, Wordle is like Tetris or playing cards. It's a very simple premise," Wackerfuss told 404, referring to official variations like the Taylor Swift version: "I don't know why they feel we are infringing on their IP.

He still responded to the DMCA notice. 'I got a message from GitHub, and I thought, screw it. 'I'm not going to get into a legal battle with the New York Times, so it wasn't worth it to me and I removed the game.'

You can read the full text at 404.