Wordle Halloween Costume Breaks the Ice at Parties

It's Halloween and that means we can all expect to see the same types of costumes that we do every year. There will be risqué versions of cute animals, there will be clever pop culture references, there will be incredibly faithful recreations of famous characters, and there will be lazy off-the-shelf purchases from pop-up Halloween stores in strip malls. Some of those may get attention — especially the provocative critters — but they won’t challenge anybody. Ches’ Hallo Wordl Halloween costume will entertain partygoers, and more importantly, help break the ice at events.

Hallo Wordl is a ghastly recreation of the popular Wordle game in physical form. It looks like a tombstone and 2,048 LEDs make up the game board display. As with Wordle, players must attempt to identify a randomly-selected hidden word by entering guesses. But in this version, the hidden word adheres to the Halloween theme. Ches doesn’t provide a list of all of the possible words, but we have to assume it includes things like “gourd,” “night,” and “blood.” To guess words, players have to know how T9 typing works. They use a small 12-key keypad to enter guesses, which appear on the LED game board worn by Ches.

That game board was made of two Adafruit 32x32 RGB LED matrices stacked in a portrait orientation. An Arduino Mega 2560 board controls those LED matrices and monitors key presses coming from the keypad. It uses Adafruit’s GFX and Matrix Panel libraries for the graphics. The graphics are simple, but the board does highlight correct letters in yellow, correct letters and positions in green, and uses a purple box to indicate the cursor position.

In order to select a word at random, Ches needed to generate a random number. That’s not a trivial task, as random number generation (RNG) is an entire field of study and is difficult to do with digital computing. Ches was able to create a seed for his RNG by getting a value from one of the Arduino’s analog pins that was unconnected and floating unpredictably.

Ches 3D-printed the tombstone enclosure to hold the electronic components. A coiled telephone cord connects the keypad to the Arduino. Power comes from a 2200mAh LiPo battery pack inside of the tombstone. Ches strapped the tombstone to his jacket so that anyone can come over and play Hallo Wordl. He wore that to a Halloween party over the weekend and reports that it was a great icebreaker.