Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

More: Daily news, true crime, and more USA TODAY podcasts

Hey there, listeners. It's Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech. Before we begin, quick shout out to our listeners, specifically, [JC Chose Me 00:00:11], who wrote a wonderful review on Apple Podcasts. This is what they say. "Brett knows this stuff. Relatable and personable. Love this podcast and the love the fact that it's short." Thank you so much, JC. Love your feedback. It is greatly appreciated. And we'll talk more about how you can share your own thoughts and reviews and stuff on the pod. Well, let's get to today's pod. Wordle, because we never talk about it on this podcast at all. Obviously, Wordle's been a huge hit and a lot's happened since the buzz around this game first started in January. It's been acquired by the New York Times. We've seen a ton of different spinoffs.

Obviously, with the acquisition by the New York Times, there have been some concerns and worries about, how much is the game going to change? Luckily, for us, there have been a lot of different versions of this game that have popped up and I break a lot down for you. I write about this in a story that you can read on tech.usatoday.com basically looking at 10 spinoffs of Wordle. Now, I know there's some that we have talked about here already so I'm not going to address those again, because there are episodes about that. So I'm going to focus on the ones that are new that maybe I haven't talked about here that I think would be fun and I think are worth checking out. The first one is Crosswordle, which it almost broke my brain at first, but it is a really cool concept. Basically, what it does is it takes Wordle and almost turns it into a crossword puzzle.

So the way the puzzle's set up is you have four rows of five letter guesses or words. The final word is at the very bottom, so it's all in green, and what you see above it is every row above it has five letter options there, but in each place is a blank square and they have different colors. So say the winning word is "about" at the very bottom, you might see a row that with one green square and one yellow square and a couple that are grayed out to tell you basically this, if it's a green square, that means it's in the final word at the bottom and it's in the same place. So you know that if it begins with an A and that first square is green, then you know they both start with A. Yellow ones, yellow tiles suggest that the letter is in the word, but it's in the wrong place. So it's one of those letters in the final word. It's just not in the right spot. So you have to figure that out.