WORDLY - WORD Game
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| WORDLY - WORD Game | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Information | |
| Name | WORDLY - WORD Game |
| Internal name | wordly_guess_the_word_game |
| Platform | ChatGPT |
| Model | GPT-4 |
| Category | Gaming |
| Description | Play Guess the WORD AI game. You need to guess a 5 letter word! Start by asking to play WORDLY game. |
| Release date | June 19 or 20, 2023 (per third party plugin trackers) |
| Available | No (plugin platform retired April 9, 2024) |
| Working | No |
| Developer contact | yuvalsuede@gmail.com |
| Auth type | None |
| API host | chat-wordle-ai-7vdz5.ondigitalocean.app |
| API spec | OpenAPI v1 at /openapi.yaml |
| Backend | DigitalOcean App Platform |
WORDLY - WORD Game is a ChatGPT plugin released in June 2023 that lets users play a Wordle style guessing game inside ChatGPT. The player tries to guess a hidden five letter word, and the plugin returns feedback on which letters are correct and whether they sit in the right position. The contact email on the manifest is yuvalsuede@gmail.com, and the backend ran on a small DigitalOcean App Platform deployment at chat-wordle-ai-7vdz5.ondigitalocean.app. WORDLY was retired along with the rest of the ChatGPT plugin platform on April 9, 2024, when OpenAI wound down third party plugins in favor of the GPT Store and the new Custom GPT format.
The plugin is a small entertainment tool rather than a piece of infrastructure. It is interesting today mostly as a historical artifact of the brief window in 2023 and 2024 when ChatGPT shipped a third party plugin store. WORDLY belongs to a long tail of casual word games that piggybacked on the global popularity of Josh Wardle's Wordle, and it shows how natural language plugins could wrap a tiny stateful backend in a conversational interface.
WORDLY is a casual word puzzle plugin. It sat in the entertainment and gaming category of the ChatGPT plugin catalog and was one of several Wordle style clones built during the months when OpenAI allowed third party developers to ship tool integrations through the plugin store. The plugin manifest uses the internal name_for_model field wordly_guess_the_word_game and presents itself to the user under the human readable name "WORDLY - WORD Game". The shorter "WORDLY" branding lifts the first syllable of "Wordle" while changing the trailing letter, a pattern common to the wave of Wordle inspired games that followed the original's late 2021 viral run.
The gameplay loop matches the well known Wordle format. A user asks ChatGPT to start a new WORDLY game, the plugin generates a hidden five letter word and a session identifier, and the user submits guesses one at a time. After each guess the plugin returns letter level feedback, marking correct letters in the correct position separately from correct letters in the wrong position. The session continues until the player solves the word or gives up and asks for the answer. The rendered output is wrapped in a code block so that the brackets, parentheses, and dots that stand in for green, yellow, and grey tiles line up visually in the chat window.
The full plugin description shown to users in the ChatGPT plugin store was:
Play Guess the WORD AI game. You need to guess a 5 letter word! Start by asking to play WORDLY game.
A shorter instruction sent to the model in the manifest read "You are a WORDLE game. Always display results as code input," which is how the developer asked ChatGPT to format guess responses as monospaced text rather than free running prose. The instruction is also revealing about how plugin manifests worked. They were not just metadata. The description_for_model field was a small prompt fragment that nudged the assistant toward a particular interaction style, and developers used it to shape tone, format, and behavior.
The plugin manifest lists yuvalsuede@gmail.com as the contact email, which is the only first party attribution available in the published manifest. The original WORDLY backend has been offline since the plugin platform shut down, and this specific plugin has not been the subject of any sustained press coverage. As a result the most reliable identification is the email field in the published manifest rather than a marketing site, a GitHub profile linked from the plugin, or a social media handle.
The backend was hosted at chat-wordle-ai-7vdz5.ondigitalocean.app, a typical DigitalOcean App Platform subdomain. The randomly generated suffix 7vdz5 is a DigitalOcean App Platform convention for apps without a custom domain. The hostname itself contains the word "wordle" rather than "wordly", which suggests the developer first prototyped the project under the Wordle name and then switched the user facing brand to WORDLY before submission to the ChatGPT plugin store. The server exposed a small OpenAPI specification at /openapi.yaml, a logo image at /static/wlogo.png, and a legal page at /legal. There was no authentication on the API, which was common for casual ChatGPT plugins that did not store user data or rely on per user state beyond the session identifier.
Third party plugin trackers list a launch date of June 19 or June 20, 2023, which places WORDLY in the first wave of community ChatGPT plugins that arrived after OpenAI opened the plugin beta to all Plus subscribers. OpenAI first announced the plugin program in late March 2023 with a small group of launch partners that included Wolfram Alpha, Zapier, Expedia, Instacart, Slack, and Shopify, and gradually opened the beta to all Plus users through May 2023. By the time WORDLY appeared, the plugin store carried more than two hundred third party integrations and was growing weekly. WORDLY was approved for the store and remained listed there until the platform was retired.
OpenAI announced the end of the plugin platform on February 23, 2024. On March 19, 2024 the plugin store closed to new installs and users could no longer start fresh conversations with plugins. Existing plugin conversations kept working until April 9, 2024, after which plugins were removed entirely. OpenAI redirected developers to build custom GPTs with actions, which use a similar OpenAPI based schema but plug into the newer GPT Store rather than the deprecated plugin sidebar. There is no public listing in the GPT Store of a custom GPT ported from this WORDLY plugin, and the original DigitalOcean backend has not been kept online as a standalone product. Several unrelated Wordle style custom GPTs exist in the GPT Store under names such as Wordle Wizard and Wordle That Works, but they were built by different developers and do not appear to share code with the WORDLY plugin.
WORDLY followed the standard ChatGPT plugin manifest format documented by OpenAI during the plugin beta. The verified manifest content is shown below, with values taken from the JSON file mirrored on the izzoa/chatgpt-plugins GitHub repository, which scraped plugin manifests directly from the live ChatGPT plugin store while it was active.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
schema_version | v1 |
name_for_human | WORDLY - WORD Game |
name_for_model | wordly_guess_the_word_game |
description_for_human | Play Guess the WORD AI game. You need to guess a 5 letter word! Start by asking to play WORDLY game. |
description_for_model | You are a WORDLE game. Always display results as code input. |
auth.type | none |
api.type | openapi |
api.url | https://chat-wordle-ai-7vdz5.ondigitalocean.app/openapi.yaml |
logo_url | https://chat-wordle-ai-7vdz5.ondigitalocean.app/static/wlogo.png |
contact_email | yuvalsuede@gmail.com |
legal_info_url | https://chat-wordle-ai-7vdz5.ondigitalocean.app/legal |
Every field in a ChatGPT plugin manifest had a specific role. The model facing fields, name_for_model and description_for_model, were injected into the system prompt of the assistant whenever the plugin was active, which is why the developer kept them short and behavioral. The human facing fields populated the plugin store listing. The auth.type of none meant the OpenAPI server was assumed to be open to public traffic, with the assistant calling it on behalf of any user who enabled the plugin. The OpenAPI URL pointed to a YAML file that described the available tool calls, and ChatGPT translated each operation into a function the language model could decide to invoke.
The OpenAPI specification exposed a small set of endpoints that ChatGPT could call as tools. Third party plugin directories that mirrored the spec list three core operations.
| Endpoint | Purpose | Notes |
|---|---|---|
start_game | Generates a new hidden five letter word and returns a session identifier. | Called once at the start of every round. |
make_guess | Accepts a five letter guess and the session ID, returns positional feedback and the running attempt count. | The main game loop. |
get_game | Returns the current state of a session, including word length and step count. | Useful when the assistant lost context or the user asked for a recap. |
The start_game and get_game calls were lightweight reads against an in memory or short term game store on the DigitalOcean server. The make_guess call did the actual scoring, comparing the guess against the secret word letter by letter and returning a structured response. Because the plugin instructed the model to render results as a code block, the user experience felt similar to the green and yellow tile grid of the original Wordle, but rendered with brackets and parentheses around letters rather than colored tiles. According to multiple plugin directories that mirrored the spec, square brackets indicated letters in the correct position and parentheses indicated letters present in the answer but in the wrong position.
There is no public record of how the backend stored game state or how long sessions persisted. Given the absence of authentication and the use of a free tier style DigitalOcean App, the most likely implementation is an in process Python or Node web service holding sessions in memory, with a random word picked from a five letter list. That is the simplest design that would satisfy the published OpenAPI, and it matches what other small Wordle clone plugins built during the same period have described in their own writeups.
A full WORDLY round looked roughly like this. The user enabled the plugin in the ChatGPT plugin store, selected it from the plugin picker under the GPT-4 model, and typed a request such as "Start WORDLY game." ChatGPT then called start_game, received a session ID and an empty board, and prompted the user for a first guess. The user submitted a five letter English word. ChatGPT called make_guess with the word and the session ID, then returned a formatted response that showed which letters were in the correct position, which letters were in the word but in the wrong position, and which letters were not in the word at all. The user kept guessing until they solved the puzzle or asked the assistant for the answer.
The plugin enforced the same constraints as the standard version of Wordle. Guesses had to be exactly five letters long, had to consist of alphabetic characters, and were expected to be real English words, although enforcement of dictionary validity depended on what the backend implemented. The game did not impose a six guess limit in the manifest, so play could continue until the user solved the word or asked ChatGPT to reveal the answer. Some plugin guides note that ChatGPT itself, prompted by the description_for_model instruction, would sometimes nudge players toward a Wordle style six guess cap even when the backend did not enforce one.
Unlike the official New York Times Wordle, which serves the same daily word to every player worldwide, WORDLY generated a fresh hidden word for each session. That allowed unlimited play but removed the social aspect of sharing results against a shared daily puzzle. Players could not post their grid to social media and challenge friends to beat their guess count on the same word, because each session was a private random draw.
A typical WORDLY exchange in ChatGPT might unfold this way.
start_game, receives a session ID, and replies along the lines of "New game started. Guess a five letter word."CRANE.make_guess with CRANE and the session ID. The backend returns a per letter result, for example C is absent, R is in the wrong place, A is correct, N is absent, E is in the wrong place.get_game and reads the session state back.The brackets and parentheses convention compensates for the fact that ChatGPT did not render colored tiles inline in mid 2023. The plugin's instruction to display results as code input gave the output a fixed width grid that lines up across rows the way the original Wordle tiles do.
WORDLY received light coverage on third party ChatGPT plugin directories. Sites such as GPTStore.AI, WhatPlugin, AI Growth Pad, Plugin Surf, StartupHub, OpenWorldAI, FindPlugin, and PlayAIPlugin mirrored the plugin manifest and added short how to guides. None of these listings show meaningful numbers of user reviews or upvotes. Plugin Surf records zero upvotes and zero comments, and the other directories show similar empty engagement counters. The plugin did not generate significant mainstream press coverage and does not appear in mainstream roundups of notable ChatGPT plugins from late 2023.
That is a fair reflection of the structure of the plugin store. A small number of integrations from large partners, including Wolfram Alpha, Expedia, Instacart, and Zapier, captured most of the attention. A much larger long tail of small entertainment and utility plugins built by individuals competed for the remaining surface area. WORDLY sat in the long tail, alongside other small word games, trivia plugins, and chat based toys. Once the distribution channel closed in April 2024, those plugins effectively disappeared from public use, because they depended on the ChatGPT sidebar for discovery and on the assistant's plugin runtime for execution.
To make sense of WORDLY it helps to step back and look at the broader ChatGPT extension story. OpenAI introduced the plugin model in March 2023 as a way to give ChatGPT access to live data and third party services through tool calls. The first batch of plugins included Wolfram Alpha for math and curated data, browsing for live web access, and a handful of consumer brands such as Expedia, Instacart, OpenTable, and Shopify. OpenAI extended the program to all Plus subscribers by mid May 2023, and by mid summer the official plugin store carried hundreds of integrations and was adding new ones weekly. WORDLY arrived in this period, on the consumer entertainment side of the catalog.
The plugin format had real limits. Plugins ran outside the main ChatGPT user interface, in a dedicated plugin sidebar, and they could not embed custom UI inside the chat window beyond what the assistant rendered in text. Each conversation could enable at most three plugins at once, which forced users to think ahead about which combinations they wanted. Discovery relied entirely on a flat plugin store with rudimentary search and category filters. Most importantly, plugins did not have access to the wider ChatGPT memory or custom instructions, so multi turn experiences had to keep their own state on the developer's backend.
In November 2023, OpenAI announced GPTs, a new way to customize ChatGPT, and a few months later it opened the GPT Store to the public. Custom GPTs and the GPT Store replaced plugins. A GPT bundles a system prompt, optional knowledge files, optional capabilities such as code interpreter and browsing, and optional actions defined by an OpenAPI specification. The OpenAPI based action mechanism is conceptually similar to the old plugin manifest, which is why so much of the WORDLY backend would in principle still be usable as an action in a GPT, even though the public plugin slot for it has gone away.
The table below compares the plugin platform to the GPT Store.
| Aspect | ChatGPT plugins (2023 to 2024) | GPT Store and custom GPTs (2024 and later) |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | March 2023 beta, open to all Plus users by May 2023 | November 2023 for GPTs, January 2024 for the public GPT Store |
| Wind down | March 19, 2024 closed to new installs, April 9, 2024 fully retired | Active |
| Building blocks | Manifest plus OpenAPI specification | System prompt, knowledge files, capabilities, optional OpenAPI actions |
| Backend required | Yes, every plugin needed a hosted API | Optional, many GPTs are prompt only |
| Concurrent in one chat | Up to three plugins | One GPT per conversation |
| Discovery | Flat plugin store | Categorized GPT Store with featured and trending sections |
| Auth options | None, OAuth, service or user level API keys | Same set, plus consumer Sign in with Google for some flows |
The transition was not just a rebrand. The new GPT Store could carry far more entries because most GPTs needed no backend, and the store passed the one million GPT mark within weeks of public launch and grew further from there. By contrast, only about one thousand plugins ever reached the official plugin store. Many plugin developers, including makers of small games like WORDLY, never ported their work to the new format. The result is that the historical record of plugins now lives mainly on community archives and the OpenAPI files that third parties mirrored from the live plugin manifests while they were still accessible.
WORDLY was not the only Wordle inspired game on the ChatGPT plugin platform, and it sits inside a broader ecosystem of word games that play well in chat. The table below lists a selection of related games, including both well known web puzzles and ChatGPT specific experiments.
| Game | Format | Where it lives | How it relates to WORDLY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wordle | Daily five letter word, six guesses | New York Times Games | The direct inspiration. WORDLY clones the core mechanic in chat. |
| Quordle | Four Wordle boards solved in parallel, nine guesses | Merriam Webster | Same letter feedback grammar, more boards. |
| Octordle | Eight Wordle boards solved in parallel, thirteen guesses | Independent web game | Scales the Quordle idea further. |
| Dordle | Two Wordle boards solved in parallel, seven guesses | Independent web game | A smaller multi board variant. |
| Heardle | Guess a song from short audio clips | Spotify, after acquisition from Glorious Studios | Wordle format applied to audio rather than letters. |
| Connections | Sort sixteen words into four groups of four | New York Times Games | Daily word puzzle with a different mechanic. |
| Spelling Bee | Form words from a seven letter wheel | New York Times Games | A different shape of vocabulary puzzle. |
| Wordscapes | Mobile crossword and anagram puzzles | PeopleFun | Long running mobile word game. |
| Wordle That Works | Wordle gameplay inside a custom GPT | GPT Store | Independent post plugin successor that runs as a GPT action. |
| Wordle Wizard | Wordle assistant and strategy helper | GPT Store | Solving aid rather than the game itself. |
| Word Guessing Game | Free chat based word guessing | GPT Store | Loose Wordle style game built on custom GPT prompts. |
The pattern across these games is the same. After the New York Times bought Wordle from Josh Wardle on January 31, 2022 for a sum reported in the low seven figures, the format went global. Developers built variations in dozens of languages, plus spinoffs that swapped letters for songs, geographic regions, or chess positions. WORDLY is the ChatGPT plugin entry in that long list, less polished than the dedicated web clones but able to ride on the chat interface that millions of Plus subscribers already had open.
WORDLY is also a small example of a much larger story about generative AI and games. Word puzzles are a particularly clean fit for large language models because the rules are simple, the state per session is small, and the model already understands the gameplay from prior coverage in its training data. A few prompt instructions or a short OpenAPI specification are enough to wrap a working game loop. The same is true for many turn based logic puzzles, trivia rounds, and text adventures.
During the ChatGPT plugin era developers shipped guess the number games, hangman variants, Mad Libs, riddle generators, choose your own adventure stories, and simple role playing toys. Most of these were small entertainment experiments rather than commercial products. The pattern carried over to the GPT Store, where the Games and Entertainment category quickly filled with thousands of prompt engineering experiments built as playable games, including murder mystery interrogations, classroom trivia, and language learning vocabulary drills.
The more interesting design question with chat based word games is how much of the logic should live in the model itself and how much should live in a backend. A pure prompt only Wordle GPT, with no actions, can struggle with the basic mechanic. Earlier ChatGPT models in particular often miscounted letter positions, leaked the secret word in the middle of a session, or accepted invalid guesses. A backend like the one WORDLY uses keeps the actual word and the scoring logic on a server the model cannot see, which makes the game more reliable. That tradeoff has not gone away with newer models. Even with GPT-4 and successors, developers who want strict rule adherence still tend to push the scoring step into deterministic code rather than relying on the assistant's own reasoning.
WORDLY is a tiny case study in this design space. The developer pushed all the game logic into a backend exposed through an OpenAPI specification, and used the description_for_model field only to shape presentation. The model's job was to be a clean front end, not to play the role of dealer. That separation is one reason the plugin worked at all, given how unreliable mid 2023 ChatGPT could be when asked to track even a five letter word across multiple turns.
Because the ChatGPT plugin platform is fully retired, WORDLY is no longer playable through ChatGPT, and the public DigitalOcean backend is offline. The artifacts that remain are the plugin manifest, the OpenAPI specification mirrored on community sites, and the third party plugin directory listings that captured screenshots and descriptions of the plugin while it was active. Anyone who wanted to revive WORDLY today could in principle build a custom GPT with the same OpenAPI based action, point it at a freshly hosted backend, and re list it in the GPT Store. As of this writing there is no public record of that having happened under the WORDLY brand.
For a player who is curious about the experience, the closest live equivalents are dedicated web Wordle clones, the official Wordle at the New York Times, or one of the playable Wordle style custom GPTs in the GPT Store such as Wordle That Works. Each of those provides a similar guess and feedback loop, although the visual presentation in modern custom GPTs is closer to native Wordle than the bracketed code block output that WORDLY produced in 2023.