Wordle got us hooked on word guessing games. Then Worldle gave geography nerds a daily challenge.
Now a Canberra-themed spin off game has entered the arena: Suburble.
The premise is simple. Guess the name of the Canberra suburb from an outline. You have six tries and each guess will indicate the distance and direction to the correct suburb.
Australian National University mathematics student Aden Power, 18, came up with the game initially as a way to entertain his family.
"Every night after dinner we play together a bunch of different Wordle variants," Mr Power said.
"We'll play Wordle and Worldle and a bunch of different spin-off games and it's almost become a little tradition over the past couple of months."
He decided to create an Easter egg hunt game for his younger brother, which involved measuring the distance between objects in his backyard and putting on a grid.
The game was a hit and the idea of applying the concept to Canberra suburbs was tossed around over dinner.
He realised the government must make the information on suburb boundaries and centres public for mapping providers to use. He stayed up late learning about the geographical file mapping formats.
By the next day he had a rough prototype that worked for the family to test.
"We just added that to our list of games to play every day and over the week I kind of made little improvements and made it look a little better," he said.
"My mum, who was actually the person who got me into coding in the first place probably eight years ago because she's a web developer, encouraged me and said, 'Hey, you should put it out there. You should let other people play with us'."
The suburble.au domain name was purchased and the game launched on Thursday afternoon. Since then, 4300 people have played it.
"I've got so many comments from people saying, 'Oh, yeah, I played this and then I took it home and I showed my wife' and 'I showed all my co-workers this game and we're all playing it together'," Mr Power said.
"It's so insane to me. It's actually mind-blowing."
The game includes Canberra's newest suburbs, such as Strathnairn and Whitlam, as well as a couple of unconventional ones - Canberra Airport and Capital Hill.
Mr Power chose inner Canberra suburbs to start with so early users would have a positive experience and come back for more. After that, the solutions will be random.
He doesn't have any plans to monetise the game and will keep coding as a hobby rather than his career. He reckons the number of school students learning to code has increased tenfold in the past three years.
The former Marist College student said the once-a-day hit kept people coming back to Wordle-style games.
"I think it's far more important that people can be like, 'Hey, did you get today's suburble yet'? Because that's also a big part of the fun of it," he said.
"Even though you're playing it by yourself, you're playing it with everyone else, too."
