This year (2022) has been the “wordle’s games” year.

Since Josh Wardle created the original game on 2021, lots of developers have created their own versions of the popular game.

I wanted to take part on this and so I created https://musterem.com

What are Wordle games and why are they interesting?

For those who doesn’t know what wordle games are (I guess there are not many), Wordle is a simple game that consists in guessing a 5 letters word in less than 6 tries.

The game can be played daily and every day there is a new word to guess.

To guess the word, the user can introduce existing words and the color of the tiles will change to show how close your guess was to the word.

If a letter is in the word and in the correct spot it will appear as green.

If a letter is in the word but in the wrong spot it will appear as yellow.

And finally if a letter is not in the word in any spot it will be painted gray.

What is Muster’em and what makes it unusual?

After understanding what wordle is, I can now explain what musterem is.

The game shares the “daily” concept with the wordle game.

Every day a new game is proposed, but in this case, there is no words to guess but a kind of maze to solve.

In Muster’em, there is a 5×5 board with multiple objects on it.

The player has to collect (or muster) all the objects in the minimum possible movements.

In case there is a path with less movements, you can retry it until you get the shortest path.

When the user finds the shortest path, the game is over for that day and the player has to wait until the next day to play a new board.

Why creating Muster’em?

As exposed in the introduction of this post, one of the reasons was to take part on this “wordle games developers trend”.

At the same time, I didn’t want to add just another copy of the game.

So I changed the guesses concept by an “open game” where only the final result is important.

Also I remembered the TSP (Travelling Salesman Problem) from the university and I wanted to find a proper implementation in javascript to find the shortest path.

So mixing the TSP and the wordle games, I ended up creating Muster’em.

What’s next on the game?

After delivering the game, I am not planning on any next steps yet.

I will use twitter to spread the word about the game a little bit and then wait to see what the users want.

If there are users I will try to apply the ideas they give, if there are no users, this will stay until the domain expires.

Maybe the idea has some potential and together with the users it can end up being someting huge.

But I won’t put all my efforts on this, at the end the initial goal is already completed, I could create a wordle game using a TSP algorithm by myself.

If you read this and have any doubt, please feel free to contact me and I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you.

Cheers!