Wordle is one of the most unique, challenging, and enjoyable puzzle games on the web. Because it presents the same puzzle to everyone once per day and is totally free to play, it's become a viral sensation that pops up in group chats and Twitter feeds around the world. Here's everything you need to know about Wordle.

Wordle is a word-guessing game that's similar to games like Mastermind. Your goal is to successfully guess the word of the day, which is a common, five-letter English word. Each time you make a guess, the game tells you which of the letters in the word you chose are in the target word. Letters that are in the right place are highlighted in green, while letters that are found in the target word but in a different location are highlighted in yellow.

Wordle gives you a total of 6 guesses to find the target word. To spice things up, Wordle insists that all 6 of your guesses are five-letter English words. This means that you can't check arbitrary strings like "RSTLN." Instead, you have to think of words that have the right combination of letters in the right places to check the theories you're working on.

Wordle offers you a new puzzle once a day. Each day, however, every player in the world gets to challenge themselves against the same word. Wordle also offers a handy spoiler-free format for posting to social media and group texts. In many circles, it's common to see these Tetris-like arrangements of gray, yellow, and green blocks. People compete informally to try to get the word in as few guesses as possible and post frustrations and thoughts about the word, their guessing strategies, and their streaks.

The "normal" way of playing Wordle allows you to fish for letters in any order. If your first guess is "AROSE," for example, and you know that the A and the E are in the right place, you could then guess LYMPH to try to check 5 new letters at once. Wordle offers a hard mode that prevents this. When playing "hard mode," you have to include yellow and green letters in subsequent guesses. While this might make you take more guesses to find the actual word, it also removes the difficulty of trying to come up with unrelated words with specific combinations of letters, meaning it may actually be easier for some people.

The official Wordle game is hosted on the New York Times' website. If you're hungry for more Wordle, however, you can get unlimited daily puzzles from a number of unlicensed spin-off sites. These sites might not use the same bank of words as the official Wordle site, but they're great places to test out new strategies so you can beat your friends in the official puzzles.

Despite the vast number of players worldwide and the single-puzzle-per-day restriction, most social circles are very free of Wordle spoilers. It's possible to look up the answer to the day's puzzle if you try, but you'll hardly ever find someone intentionally posting the word for free. After all, why would they? You'd be able to beat their score.