'We've built an online word game and we hope it takes off like Wordle'
Three years ago, whilst on holiday in Spain, Stuart Miller challenged his brother-in-law Matt Robinson to a word game. It was something his dad had played regularly against friends back in the 1950s and he’d taught it to Stuart, when he was growing up in Leeds.
It had always been played with a pencil and paper, but in sunny Spain, Stuart and Matt had an idea – to translate it into an online version. A month ago, Griddable was finally born and the pair hope it will take off in a similar way to Wordle.
"I'm very proud because I think we've built something really good and fun and it's just really nice to see people picking it up and playing it,” says Matt.
"We'd like to see the number of people using it increasing,” adds Stuart, who works in financial services. “And we are already seeing that which is partly from us telling people about it, but it's also partly from the virality and the sharing option of the game.”
There are two options for playing the game – either against the computer in a daily challenge or against a friend in a competition. Players take turns to add letters to a 4x4 grid and try to get the most and longest words both left to right and top to bottom. "We discussed over many hours how best to create an online version but struggled to develop it as we are not coders,” explains 50-year-old Stuart. “However, with the dawn of AI, Matt managed to harness the new ways of developing a website and built the game.”
Matt is a finance director at a technology company and had been keeping an eye on developments in AI, “partly for work, partly out of general interest”. "I'd started reading about these companies that will help people who don't code to code and you write prompts to the AI in English and describe what you want and then it will code it for you. I thought it sounds good in theory but I bet it won't work. But I thought I’d give it a go.”
The first platform he tried didn’t give the results he wanted, but Matt, 48, then tried again using another. “I had this slightly revelatory weekend where I started talking to this AI and it started producing at that stage something very unlike what the game is now. But the bare bones of it – enough of it that I thought this might actually work.”
A lot of tweaking and debugging followed but the pair, who both now live in London, finally ended up with a product they were happy to launch. Now, they just needed a name. Matt says: "I was quite keen that it had ‘le’ at the end because there's a rich tradition of that I think with word games of like Scrabble, Boggle, Wordle. So it was nice for us to find a name that fitted into that.”
The duo are now pondering making a physical version of the game too. “We might turn it into a little box game, a sort of stocking filler for Christmas,” Stuart says. “But most of our efforts are about raising awareness of Griddable online and trying to get people to play and like it.”
Visit griddable.co.uk