Lordle of the Rings

Lordle of the Rings is a letter game whose dictionary fits entirely in a single book: the instruction beneath the keyboard requires five-letter words, proper names included, drawn from the main text of The Lord of the Rings. The original GitHub address now points to lordle.digitaltolkien.com.

1. Type a five-letter word on the QWERTY virtual keyboard shown beneath the grid.
2. Confirm with ENTER, correct with the backspace key.
3. Repeat line by line: the grid has six rows of five boxes.

For the very particular pleasure of hunting for a word by mentally running through Tolkien's pages rather than a dictionary. The constraint turns a vocabulary exercise into an exercise in the reader's memory.

The revealed grid was still blank: thirty white boxes across six lines, and a keyboard with no key yet colored. The only constraint given to the player is the line under the keyboard, which restricts guesses to five-letter words that appear in the main text of The Lord of the Rings. The page is presented as built on vue-wordle and inspired by WORDLE.

Core play

A single default puzzle: the game presents a standard vue-wordle / Wordle-style interface with six rows of five boxes. Players type and submit five-letter guesses (proper names included) that must appear in the main text of The Lord of the Rings, and the page gives no indication of any alternate or additional modes.

• Proper names are allowed, which opens the field well beyond everyday vocabulary: five-letter toponyms and surnames from the novel are in the dictionary.
• Conversely, a perfectly valid English word that does not appear in the book has no place here; the instruction refers to the main text of the work.