What if Wordle Was Meaningful?

The Intro:

Sorry this one took so long—turns out, making a game from scratch is way harder than I expected. But I promise it’s worth it.

It all started one morning in January. My phone lit up with yet another notification from the family group chat. This chat has one purpose and one purpose only: sharing Wordle scores. That’s it. Just a never-ending stream of green and yellow squares, like some kind of long, decorated carpet running down an endless hallway.

I played along, even though I knew exactly how it would go. My first guess is always "Ocean"—sometimes "Smile"—but after that, I have zero strategy. And honestly? 90% of the words I try aren’t even real. The truth is, I’d flunk a 3rd-grade spelling bee. I’ve made peace with that fact, and I thank God for spellcheck every day. But Wordle? Wordle makes me confront my dumb ass daily. I don’t mind feeling dumb if it leads to something useful, but instead, all I get is a bumpy ride from "Ocean" to "Valve."

Still, I kept going, hoping that maybe—just maybe—Wordle would make me a little sharper. Then it happened. I was on my last guess—an "O" and an "A" locked in place, an "R" in the wrong spot. Confidently, I typed in "Foray," and then the final word popped up: "Borax." What the fuck is "Borax"? I stared at the screen, annoyed that Wordle doesn’t even go the extra step to tell you what the word means. I closed the site, didn’t share my results, and refused to look it up out of principle. I just assumed that a Dr. Seuss word finally made it into the dictionary.

And then it hit me—what if there were a Wordle-like game where you actually learned something useful? Not just obscure vocabulary, but surprising facts, real-world knowledge, and things people would actually want to remember and share? How hard could that be? Just find a topic people want to learn about, design a game that actually teaches them in a fun, intuitive way, code an entire website that works not just once but daily, and—oh yeah—manually input new lessons every single day for eternity. Simple. Looking back, was it worth it? Probably not. But we’re here now, so let’s hope it was.

Step 1: What do people like learning about?

This was harder than I expected. I started by looking at what my family—those same Wordle-obsessed relatives—actually enjoyed learning about. For a moment, I thought I had struck gold. My mother-in-law is obsessed with Flight Aware, constantly tracking flights like some kind of air traffic controller in her free time. Every conversation somehow circled back to flight paths, airport codes, and which airline was running late. So I thought, why not turn that into a game?

The idea: use real-time flight data, drop some cryptic clues, and have players guess the origin and destination. I even built a prototype, watching little airplanes move across the screen like a high-stakes game of Guess Who. But then I had to stop and ask myself: "Would anyone actually remember this?" Was discovering that a Delta flight took off from Denver really the kind of knowledge that stuck? Not really. So, I scrapped it.

I was back to square one—until the NFL playoffs rolled around. Suddenly, every podcast, every SportsCenter segment, every casual conversation was packed with jaw-dropping stats. The Detroit Lions clinched the NFC’s No. 1 seed for the first time in franchise history. No team had ever won three Super Bowls in a row. And, in all the years since Amazon Alexa was invented, she had never once uttered the words, "The New York Jets are in the playoffs." It was a comedy of numbers, a chaotic mix of history, heartbreak, and pure statistical absurdity.

And that’s when it clicked—people don’t just love learning stats, they love sharing them. I found myself dealing out random NFL stats for about 3 weeks during a totally unrelated conversation. Stats have this way of creeping into discussions, turning everyday moments into trivia showdowns. Stats aren’t just numbers; they’re time capsules. They hold history, drama, the impossible streaks, the cursed teams, the once-in-a-lifetime records. They take random trivia and turn it into legendary storytelling, the kind of facts that make you stop mid-sentence and say, "Wait… what?"

Step 2: Design a game that makes learning stats fun and intuitive.

Once I knew I wanted to design a game around teaching stats, everything started to click. I focused on the top five subjects in different categories, making learning easy, engaging, and rewarding. The goal? Every day, players walk away knowing the top five in something new—quick, fun, and effortlessly informative.

The game presents a title like "Highest Grossing Animated Movie Franchises of All Time," followed by bar graphs with their respective values. Below them are five potential answers—Shrek, Toy Story, Frozen, etc. Players must match each name to the correct graph, one at a time, with three guesses to get it right. After each incorrect guess, they receive a clue to help them narrow it down, turning the challenge into an interactive, educational puzzle. It’s a simple concept, but one that makes learning stats feel like a challenge worth taking on.

Step 3: Code the web game.

This wasn’t easy. I’m a product designer, not a software developer. I design the buildings; engineers bring them to life. But for this project, I became the engineer—with ChatGPT and Cursor as my teammates. Learning to code beyond basic front-end work was rough. I struggled with syntax errors, functions breaking for no reason, and hours lost to debugging. There were moments I thought I had finally figured something out, only for the entire thing to break the second I changed one line. But through trial, error, and a whole lot of Googling, I started to understand how the pieces fit together. I’ve tinkered with front-end before, but this was next level. I built the game in Framer using a code component, relying on my visual thinking skills.

In Framer, components are like smart Lego blocks—interactive, reusable, and flexible. I created the StattyGame component to track progress, handle guesses, and keep everything running.

My new favorite thing? Property controls. They let me add new games, tweak labels, adjust bar heights, swap colors, and refine hints—all without touching code. Instead of hardcoding every game, I plug in new data through Framer’s UI, keeping things fresh and the game going every day.

I started in Figma, then fed the HTML structure to ChatGPT to generate the foundation. ChatGPT got me halfway there, producing bulk code based on my setup vision. From there, I pasted it into Cursor for targeted refinements—smoother animations, UI tweaks, and performance optimizations. Need an emoji scoreboard fix? Cursor handled it. Better feedback for wrong guesses? Cursor refined it. This back-and-forth let me fine-tune every detail while keeping full creative control.

Step 4: Manually input new lessons.

Coming up with daily stats is way harder than picking a random five-letter word like fucking 'Borax'—which still feels like a made-up word. This isn’t my job—I’m not a statistician, and you can’t just make stats up. But I loved this idea too much to let that stop me. So I started with five stats and kept building.

Thankfully, I noticed more and more accounts on Instagram and X, like @statspanda and @stats_feed, popping up in my feed. These accounts post interesting stats daily, and they became the gas for the engine.

Still, there’s one problem—I have to manually input these stats. Each game has five names, each name needs a clue, and each belongs to a bar on the graph. Figuring out clues and calculating graph proportions is no joke. But thankfully, I pay $20/month for ChatGPT to enable my dumb habits.

So I built a prompt:

"Here’s an image of a list of items and values. Identify the top five, scale their values from 100 to 0, and return them in this format:

Sweden
Clue = Think – IKEA
Bar Value = 48"

Now, when I see an interesting stat, I screenshot it, send it to ChatGPT, and get my answers in seconds. Copy, paste, add images—done.

The Final Takeaway

The last thing I want to do with this newsletter is strip away the creative journey. Too often, we only see the final product—the polished, finished thing—but never the struggle, the failures, the relentless effort that brings it to life. Creativity isn’t effortless; it’s messy, frustrating, and sometimes feels impossible. But that’s what makes it so rewarding.

People might see this game and think, "If Joe can do it, so can I." And maybe they can—but they’ll quickly realize that bringing an idea to life is a battle. Debugging errors, refining interactions, hitting roadblocks—it’s exhausting. I hated most of this process. Half the time, I had no clue what I was doing and felt like I was throwing away weekends for nothing. AI helped, but it also drove me insane. Things broke. I lost hours of work. I wanted to quit more times than I can count. But in the middle of that chaos, something clicked: creativity is about pushing through the doubt, learning as you go, and figuring out what truly matters.

And you don’t have to do it alone. Creativity thrives in community—whether it’s bouncing ideas off others, getting help when you're stuck, or simply finding inspiration in someone else's journey. The best projects are rarely built in isolation. Huge shoutout to Muhammad Shahin, a complete stranger who answered my question on a random Framer community board and helped me structure my component properly. Without his insight, and contribution, Statty might not exist.

So if you’re reading this—embrace the challenge. Keep going, even when it sucks. Especially when it sucks. The struggle is part of the story, and that’s what makes it worth it.

Oh yeah, and go play Statty. Share it with your friends. And most importantly, keep creating, keep experimenting, and keep pushing through the hard parts—because that’s where the magic happens. 🙏

It might be shit.

Thanks for reading.