I was waiting in line at the clinic today for my daughter’s turn to see her pediatrician, and while we were doing so, we were perusing the New York Times’ app and its set of games. Our first port-of-call was Wordle, the phenomenon that they bought over back in 2022. Not much luck this time, as I used up all my tries to guess the word-of-the-day ‘EXPEL’. Jeez. Anyways it was Spelling Bee next, and wanting to impress my six-year old, I put in extra effort into the game and hit the paywall for the first time. Turns out that if I wanted to advance my ranking I would have to pay for a games subscription with the NYT. Dang.
But I did read a piece on WIRED about the New York Times intends to survive in this digital age, which is available here. It explains why other than the subscription to read the news on the New York Times app, there are also subscriptions for New York Times Cooking (which introduced an excellent recipe to Rao’s meatballs with marinara sauce, which I’ve been using for every festive season for the past 6 years) and for the games under the Play section of the app.
But back to our first port-of-call, Wordle. I remember playing this game daily during the recovery stages of the pandemic, and posting results on Facebook. Needless to say, the popularity of the game inspired plenty of imitations with almost all of them having a ‘-dle’ suffix attached to them to indicate some Wordle like gameplay elements.
The indie game that I have the privilege to check out lately is a Wordle-like game, but it doesn’t come with the ‘-dle’ suffix. And unlike Wordle, you only get three attempts. Title WATO, it was developed by a trio of indie game developers to be the Wordle of Statistics. The name of the game is an acronym for “What are the odds”. It turns out to be quite fun as you try to arrange five fascinating statistics/trivia, in the order of likelihood.
For each correctly placed statistic, a tick (or check, depending where you are from) mark will appear on that particular tile, leaving you with the job of re-arranging the rest. And like I mentioned earlier, you only get three attempts, so this does ratchet up the tension a little bit. Some of the statistics shown are not necessarily from the United States, and I’ve encountered one which was attributed to the United Kingdom. WATO helpfully denotes this by using country flags next to each stat.
The results screen will show the probability of each of the statistics, and the game helpfully includes links to sources of these stats for further reading in your phone’s browser. And like Wordle, you can share your results online replete with those green colour boxes. Another plus point would be while WATO is available free of charge, there are no ads to bother you (but note to the devs, there’s no harm in trying to make a living off your game)!
For players who are interested, the developers have included a function to contribute a statistic to their database. If there’s an area for improvement, better support for VoiceOver (screen reader) would be a plus; I hope to highlight this to more developers moving forward.
Nineoverten.com rates WATO a 4.5 out of 5. If you love trivia, statistics and Wordle, the odds are you definitely would love WATO. The game is out now for both iOS and Android platforms, check them out over here:
