Yeardle is a new online game based on the popular Wordle. Instead of letters, you play with numbers.

You'll need to brush up on your dates if you want to succeed. When was William Shakespeare born? In what year was electricity discovered?

With Yeardle, you are allowed to guess the correct year in five attempts. Indeed, your choices might be made with pure guesses or there might be some prior knowledge there, too. Give it a go.

Each guess must contain four digits to make up the year. See the game's interface. Its intuitive enough. The numbers will change to green if they are in the correct spot, yellow if it is in the year but wrong spot and grey if the number is not in the year.

In what year was Oxford University founded? Have a crack on Yeardle. This entertaining game will serve up plenty more intriguing questions. 

As a free to play word game, Yeardle is bound to grow in popularity. Fans of Wordmeister, Lexigo, Google Feud, Word Wipe and Wander Words should enjoy Yeardle. 

Games like Yeardle are effectively on the up after Wordle evidently took a bit of a hit when it was acquired by the New York Times.

"I am incredibly pleased to announce that I've reached an agreement with the New York Times for them to take over running Wordle going forward," said Wordle inventor, Josh Wardle,  at the time of the acquisition.

"If you've followed along with the story of Wordle, you'll know the NYT games play a big part in its origins and so this step feels very natural to me. It has been incredible to watch a game bring so much joy to so many and I feel so grateful for the personal stories some of you have shared with me - from Wordle uniting distant family members, to provoking friendly rivalries, to supporting medical recoveries."

A chart shared on Reddit, however, has tracked the decline of Wordle's popularity since. The chart cites data from WordleStats.

From early to late January 2022, the data tracked upward. When the announcement of the sale to the New York Times came out in late January, the popularity grew more. But since Wordle's move to the New York Times website in early February, a decline has been noticed and that was largely the trend until the end of the chart's data in mid-March 2022.

As to reasons for the decline in Wordle popularity, well, there could be a few. The New York Times reportedly censored and removed some words after acquiring Wordle. These included agora, fibre, lynch, pupal, slave and wench.

The New York Times also closed down the Wordle archive. This was done so users could not go back and play previous puzzles. New players who wanted to play old puzzles could not.

Despite the evident decline of the popularity of Wordle, games like Yeardle and others continue to keep people interacting online over history, contemporary dates and others. These are enjoyed by many players the world over and there should be many more to come.