As reported by 404 Media, famous internet puzzle rightsholder and imperialist rag The New York Times has decided that they own the exclusive copyright to 5x6 grid games using green and yellow to indicate correct placement of glyphs.

Triage below the cut.

decided to write about this shit because it gets me fired up and i wanna help keep people informed

Love to see highlighted 'copyrighted gameplay' and be immediately aware because of my over-a-decade-long background in tabletop spaces that that's fucking bullshit.

The Open Game License didn't exist to allow creatives and other publishers to make D&D-derivative games (something they were already doing and, under US copyright law, could do), but to give them license to use the very same language D&D was using (because modes of play, such as Texas hold'em, cannot be copyrighted, but the shape and words of the Player's Handbook can be; if you find a way to rewrite D&D from scratch in such a way that it contains no excerpts from the Core Rulebooks of D&D, Wizards has no grounds under which to sue you for copying their game, supposedly).

Now, if these Wordle clones were using exact pulls of the base code of Wordle, then there might be something to this 'copyrighted gameplay' nonsense, but recreating the game with ReactJS seems like it's changing the framework entirely, leaving only the front-end looks of the damn thing to be the only part that can be properly infringing.

But I don't go here and I'm not a lawyer, so take my commentary with a grain of salt.