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.
Most immediately, they have taken down the github repo for Reactle a web-dev project to recreate Wordle easily using ReactJS, and numerous related clones, many of which do not use words and iterated on the concept in considerable ways. An instance of it appears to still be deployed as of writing.
They do not seem to have attacked the wider selection of Wordle clones online yet, and they may simply be relying on the easy abuse of DMCA takedowns that Github helps automate.
The New York Times official statement on the matter shows their true colours (emphasis mine):
The Times has no issue with individuals creating similar word games that do not infringe The Times’s “Wordle” trademarks or copyrighted gameplay. The Times took action against a GitHub user and others who shared his code to defend its intellectual property rights in Wordle. The user created a “Wordle clone” project that instructed others how to create a knock-off version of The Times’s Wordle game featuring many of the same copyrighted elements. As a result, hundreds of websites began popping up with knock-off “Wordle” games that used The Times’s “Wordle” trademark and copyrighted gameplay without authorization or permission.
It is clear that The New York Times considers itself the ultimate owner of the conceptual gameplay of Wordle itself, and the final arbiter of what clones are allowed to exist.
Taking down open-source repositories in this manner is considered an attack on free culture, as open-source projects and free sharing of programming techniques are necessary to allow free culture to flourish in the digital age. Although many clones are playable online, stifling the sharing of how these clones work is a direct attack on our culture. It is like preventing a painter from talking about their brushes.
Wordle is itself iterative
Very little needs to be said about this which hasn't been said elsewhere, but it is worth noting that there are two other word games which bear striking similarity to Wordle.
The first is Lingo, a game show that ran in the 80s. CNBC outlines how US intellectual property cases have established precedence that you can't easily protect game mechanics in a way that transcends medium. A game show's mechanics are very hard to declare ownershup of in a way that would let you restrict a computer game's mechanics. Another game show copying Lingo may have issues, but a browser game is fairly free to do what it wants.
Interestingly, there is also a French board game which bears a striking resemblance, as pointed out by game developer Younès here. It is almost as if concepts and mechanics of games such as these are components that arise out of our shared culture, rather than some bolt of brilliance blasted into our brains divinely. 
Attacked Wordle clones:
Both clones taken down during this attack and in previous attacks. Please feel free to comment or otherwise inform me of additional clones under attack so I may continue populating this list. As the github repo has been taken down without the node graph being archived, it is hard to verify what other repos have been taken down as of the time of writing.
- Reactle - The original clone
- Reactle (WebXDC) - A fork that runs inside chat windows
- Gene Wordle - A clone focused on gene sequencing
- Yorùbá Wordle - A clone using Yorùbá words
- Korean Wordle - A clone using Korean words
- Bosnian Worlde - A clone using Bosnian words
- Wirdle - A clone using Shaetlan words
