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Cricket Wordles: Crickdle, Crickle, Nurdle and Stumple

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Wordle has inspired a whole slew of similar puzzle games. Here are four cricket-themed ones we’ve tried: Crickdle, Crickle, Nurdle and Stumple.

Crickdle

Crickdle’s creator, a British student called Ayush, emailed us about this one. It’s a player of the match guessing game where you’re given the match result and the player’s performance in that match. You get four guesses, but we got today’s in one. Come on!

Crickle

Crickle is the same as Wordle but with cricketer names. We actually found it quite hard to come up with names because our brain sometimes likes to have context before it can come up with things. We actually came to a grinding halt as early as our second guess. During this blank spell, we discovered that you cannot guess cricket writers. Next guess we discovered that you also cannot guess at least one Sri Lankan Test cricketer for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to us. (Poor Lahiru Gamage.) This one is really hard.

Nurdle

Seemingly the same as Crickle, only instead of having to come up with six-letter cricketer names, you have to come up with seven-letter ones. First names are allowed, which is maybe helpful given that coming up with valid guesses seems to the greatest challenge.

Stumple

Again, you’re trying to guess the cricketer, but this time you get a bit more of a steer. After each guess, Stumple gives you a yes, no or adjacent for nationality, playing role, retirement status, year of birth, batting handedness, total international matches and – frequently unnecessarily – current IPL team. (We got today’s player in six guesses, one of which was experimental pissing about.)

Imagery: If you’re trying to guess the cricketer at the top of the page, he’s a Dall-E creation from a while back. We can’t actually remember what we typed in to generate him.

We can email you the article whenever we write something. Sound good? Yeah? Give it a go then.

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18 comments

  1. The only one I liked was Stumple. Also took me six guesses. The other games not to my taste.

    Thanks for reviewing them all though, KC. Interesting to see them.

      1. Actually I found myself migrating the the Crickdle one again this morning. It reminds me a bit of the Heardle and Worldle type games – where you sort-of either know it or you don’t or just occasionally you can think of two or three things to try before either getting it or giving up. Given the 30-45 seconds that sort of exercise tends to take, I might go for that one quite often. Stumple I rather like and might “stick” within my routine for a while.

        It’s the two that hug too close to the Wordle concept that don’t please me – as you say, insufficient context.

        FYI, of the Worlde-type word puzzles out there, the one I like best is Quordle.

      2. The best Wordle-style game BY FAR is Tradle, brought to you by MIT’s Observatory of Economic Complexity.

        Complexity, economics, helpful if you’re a bit world-travelly… I can’t think of a game more tailor-made for you, Ged!

        https://oec.world/en/tradle/

      3. Tradle is wonderful, Bail-out, thank you for that. Quite similar to Worldle (country map shapes) which I also like, but Tradle is more interesting than Worldle. I got Tradle in three today – schoolboy error on the second guess – I should have got it in two. Today’s Worldle was a doddle.

        Stumple is the only one of the above lot that seems to be maintaining my interest. The third Crickdle I tried will almost certainly be my last.

      4. Tradle reminds us of when we were in Maharashtra and a 10-year-old boy called Shaun tried to engage us in conversation. “What are your country’s major crops?” he asked us as an opener. We couldn’t answer with any real confidence so tried to turn the conversation to cricket. He had a really super-weird favourite cricketer but we can’t exactly remember who. It was someone like Steve Rhodes but probably actually even more obscure than that.

  2. Seconded (or thirded) on Stumple. I got today’s in three tries. It does feel like the most genuinely crickety one!

    1. I can see the “role” part of Stumple being a source of infuriation. Shouldn’t “wicketkeeper batsman” or “batting all-rounder” be rated as at least “close” to “top-order batsman”? There’s always a fun debate about who’s really an all-rounder anyway… even at the extreme end. Was Kallis really a batter who bowled quite a lot? Is it crazy to call Tendulkar an all-rounder rather than a batter given that on the ICC’s official rankings, he used to be rated the world’s #2 or #3 ODI all-rounder for about two years in the mid-90s? The all-rounder section also seems to classify all-rounders as either batting or bowling, which is a bit harsh on those who are more balanced between the two, and doesn’t consider their bowling style at all. As a result it turns out Sean Abbott is “not even close” to right-arm pace.

      I’m quibbling and it would be hard to implement “role” correctly when the whole concept is inherently so fuzzy. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t annoying!

  3. Hmm.

    Apparently they just held the inaugural draft for “Major League Cricket” here.

    The internet tells me that the Seattle Orcas will have Quinton De Kock and Mitchell Marsh playing for them.

    This could be surreal, I should try to attend a game.

    1. Ah well, never mind.

      “While Seattle will not host any matches during the 2023 season, the team, along with MLC, is working with King County and the City of Bellevue to build a Cricket Community Park that could host up to 6,000 people for future Seattle Orcas’ home games and other international cricket events.”

      So there’ll be a team, but they wont play any home games. Ah well, I’m sure the whole league won’t fold before they get around to building the stadium.

  4. If only there were a wordle-type on-line cricket game that was based on cricketers’ characteristics, such as their hirsuteness and/or rotundness as well as their on-field achievements.

    It might be named “cricket top trumple” or something of that ilk.

  5. My sister and I used to play a game where I would email her the career statistics of people who played 3 ODIs for New Zealand during the 90s and she had to guess who it was.

    It was called Warren Wisnewski or Glen Sulzberger?

  6. I liked Crickdle and Stumple. The other two can go to hell because the six-letter one requires seven-letter guesses and the seven-letter one requires six-letter guesses.

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