During the early days of 2022, I, like many others, was swept up playing Wordle every morning. I still play it occasionally, but I no longer live in fear of losing my streak. When the game first skyrocketed in popularity, I also played a bunch of the Wordle clones that people created to try and capitalize on the game's success.
There was Worldle, where you guess the country by its silhouette. For music lovers, there was Heardle1, where you guess a song each day. And who could forget one of my personal favorites, Tradle, where you guess the country by its various exports?
But the Wordle clone I love most of all is the one I created with my friend Alex, which is really just our take on the world's oldest game2: "How many fingers am I holding up?"
And that's how we ended up with the intentionally awful name, Fingle.
The rules of Fingle:
Round 1
The dealer: With either hand, hold up between 1 and 5 fingers and then call the player who you want to guess.
The player: When you answer the phone, say the number of fingers you think they’re holding up. If you get it right, you move on to Round 2. If you get it wrong, you lose.
Round 2
The player: Since you got the number of fingers right, now you get to guess which fingers are being held up. If you get it right, you win the “Full Fingle” —exciting!
If you get it wrong, you just get a point for guessing the number of fingers correctly.
That’s it. That’s the game!
…Why are you telling me all of this?
Over the weekend, I thought I'd challenge myself to see if I could use ChatGPT to program a simple web version of Fingle in under 20 questions. I spent time crafting my first message with the hope of getting as much out of the prompt as possible. ChatGPT provided some basic coding advice, and by the fifth question, I had a working version of the game on my local machine. Not bad.
After I polished up the basics, I splurged and bought a domain name so that I could share my creation with my friends. Right now, the online version is a simple single-page application where you can play against the computer. But that's not enough for me. I want to make something more than just a dumb game played against the computer. My vision is to make a dumb game played against ~friends~.
Of course, playing Fingle over the phone doesn't scale well as you add more players. Enter fingle.club, the online club where we can all be idiots together. It's still a bit of a placeholder, but my goal is to create an fully-fledged player vs. player league. I don't have all the details ready to share just yet, but rest assured, I'll let you all know when I do.
Until then, feel free to play against the bot, or call me directly if you want to try the real experience. I'm always happy to hear from potential Finglers.
Spotify actually acquired it—and I learned while writing this that it will be sunset May 5th. RIP Heardle!
Don’t fact check that. However, I did have ChatGPT write a history of Fingle back in December and I saved the screenshot. So just pretend this is true.
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“If you get it wrong, you lose.” And it Germanic Fingle (popular in the Midwest states of the US) you hang up immediately to further punctuate your loss. 😘