Regina man mistaken for inventor of Wordle fielding flood of emails, CNN interview request

At first, Josh Wardle thought the text message from the American news channel CNN asking him for an interview was a scam.

After all, why would CNN's flagship morning news program New Day want to spend six minutes of prime network time interviewing a 30-year-old equipment salesman from Regina?

It turns out the show's producer did want to interview Josh Wardle — just not the one living in Regina.

"He called and he said, 'Hey, Josh, I'd like to congratulate you on the success of Wordle,' and me being kind of oblivious, in the moment I was like, 'I honestly have no idea what you're talking about,'" the Regina man said.

What the CNN producer was talking about was a new and tremendously popular online word puzzle game invented by one Josh Wardle, and named Wordle as a play on his name.

The puzzle is simple enough: once per day, players have six chances to guess a five-letter word of the day. Colour-coding in the five blocks gives players clues about whether they have the right letters.

Though it sounds basic, the game has hooked hundreds of thousands of people who visit the site each day to try to solve the latest puzzle — including Regina's Jason Hammond.

"They only release one puzzle a day … so everyone gets to work on that one puzzle and then you're done," said Hammond, who says his wife is also hooked on Wordle.

"That's kind of contrary to a lot of other things we do in society. Right now it's a very bingeable culture, where we watch Netflix and we binge Netflix and we binge social media feeds and we binge junk food and we binge everything these days."

Wordle's popularity has skyrocketed to the point there are even knock-offs and rogue bots launched to try to ruin the daily Wordle fun by giving away the answer. 

And Regina's Josh Wardle just happens to share the same name as the elusive and media-shy creator of the game. 

The Josh Wardle who invented Wordle lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and made the puzzle up for his partner, who likes word games, he told the New York Times.

But now, Regina's Wardle has been inundated with emails and has seen LinkedIn searches for his name increase by the hundreds as people try to locate Wordle's creator.

Some mistaken sleuthing led the CNN producer to the Regina Josh Wardle, rather than the Brooklyn Josh Wardle.

"I'm not [going to], but it's getting to the point where I've seen enough articles saying people have reached out for comment and haven't gotten anything that I just might pick up the mantle and see if I can ride this for a bit," the Regina man said.

"Maybe I'll reach out to him and we can kind of come up with some mutual agreement that he can have all the undercover fame and I'll take the front face of it all."

Regina's Wardle, who notes his name is fairly unique, hopes his 15 minutes of fame will be for something more than a case of mistaken identity.

"I feel like I need to do something … substantial because there's a very good chance that this is the peak of name recognition of Josh Wardle," he said.

"And at 30, having your name recognition peak is a little bit of a depressing thought. So I feel like it's just given me motivation to find my own thing to do and try to make a name for myself."

And if nothing else, Wardle has a new pastime — he's started playing Wordle just to find out what all the fuss was about.