Five Great Things About Fibble

How one small tweak turned Wordle into a brain-burning probability game

What’s Fibble?

Fibble, found at https://fibble.xyz, is a Wordle style game by Richard Garfield (with help from his wife and a friend). Like Wordle, guess a 5 letter word and you’re given clues on whether the letters are correct both for position and existence. But there’s one big twist, every row (that doesn’t contain the correct word), one of the letters will have an incorrect color.

That means this guess pattern:

🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ could actually be

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️

or 🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️ x4 (it could be in any of the other 4 positions)

or 🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️

or 🟩🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ x4

So one line actually could represent one of 10 different options. This creates extra challenge and adds an element of deductive reasoning to the experience.

Wordle Style Games

All Wordle style games share one thing in common, the idea that you’re collapsing information downward from a bunch of options at the start, to a few options at the very end. But if Wordle is like using a vacuum sealer to stuff clothes into a suitcase, Fibble is the equivalent of trying to stuff them in through sheer force, until you’re done, something’s always sneaking through your fingers.

5 Things That Make Fibble Special

Economical game design is hard. With one rule change it adds an immense amount of depth and complexity. As Ben Brode notes in his talk on Marvel Snap. Not all complexity is created equally, and Fibble does so excellently.

1. Fibble Shows How Complexity and Challenge Are Different

It’s hard to explain why complexity and challenge are different ideas in a game. Things that are complex are often more challenging. But rules can be simple and still create all sorts of complexity. The idea of one result being a lie is easy to understand, but it creates a huge challenge that warps the very nature of the game. For better and worse it turns a game about the words you know, into a game about the probabilities of the relationship between letter combinations within a word. You start asking questions like “How likely is it that there’s another word with pl in that position?” and “If so, does that mean one of those letters is a lie?”

2. Chance Creates Dynamic and Oppositional Gameplay

Here’s an example of a time where the same letter was the lie on multiple consecutive rows. It’s not particularly likely to happen, but it happens the more you play. It makes you feel like the game is playing against you, and that’s neat.

3. It Creates Unique Patterns to Look out For

One of the coolest parts of playing through the game is when you see combinations of lies and truths that are impossible. Like the above where the L and O are both yellow and both grey on adjacent guesses. The moments this happens feels exhilarating because you’ve unlocked all of this information, both about those letters, but also about the other letters in the row. It creates an incredible amount of certainty in a game built around uncertainty.

4. It’s a Game You Have to “Figure Out”

Wordle is a game about knowing words. Fibble is a game about understanding the relatively likelihood of when certain letters will appear in words and at what positions. It’s a game about looking at the potential branching paths that one answer could represent and then figuring out which one is most likely, and how you can make a subsequent guess that gives you the most information about the new path. It’s a more “gamey” game.

5. It Solves the “Use Previous Guesses” Strategy

This is something that most players probably don’t care (or think) about at all, but Fibble solves the challenge that Wordle has, with guessing and dominant strategies. Technically the on average best strategy for Wordle is to guess two sets of words with unique letters your first two. This gives you the best chance that your third and fourth guesses will be absolutely correct.

Wordle solved this with a menu option you select to disallow doing this. Fibble solves this because guessing two words that don’t overlap is a huge risk that might leave you as confused as if you hadn’t made the guesses in the first place.

Bonus: The Design Problems it Creates

Wordle is a game about self-expression as much as it is about the puzzle. That’s part of what’s so enchanting about it is it creates a visual representation of how you think about words and language. Fibble is not, it’s a puzzle game about how to successful find the right word. There’s no place that’s clearer than this than the starting tile. Wordle gives you any option for what to put in. Fibble picks for you.

I think it’s a smart design choice by Fibble, because it prevents analysis paralysis at the start in a game that can feel daunting. But it makes the game a little less approachable for non-puzzle enthusiasts.

Wordle-likes Have Been Good For Game Design

It’s been fun to see the proliferation of Wordle style phone games and the new ideas that come with them.

Games like Murdle, Worldle, and Numberle have brought warm, approachable, smart game designs to a small format, at a time when it occasionally feels like small games aren’t popular commercial designs because they don’t have a clear path to massive financial returns.