Kittle: NFL Wordle

WELCOME TO THE LEAGUE: About Kittle

Welcome to Kittle: NFL Wordle! Kittle is a textual Wordle-style game, and it is written and played in R.

I wrote this game in the fall of 2021, and it is inspired by the original Wordle game by Josh Wardle, along with prior sports spin-offs Poeltl by Gabe Danon and MLB Pickle (originally titled WARdle) by Jeremy Frank and Zach Ellis. I created this game before the publication of the popular NFL Wordle game Weddle, and I took no inspiration from Weddle.

NFL fans will recognize that the game is named after San Francisco tight end George Kittle.

TRAINING CAMP: Downloading Kittle

Follow these directions to download and set up everything you'll need to get started with playing Kittle.

1. If you don't have one already, download an IDE that supports R, such as RStudio.
2. Click on the latest Release on the right side of this page, and download the files kittle.R and 2021.sheets.zip. i. IMPORTANT: Make sure those two files are in the same folder on your computer! Otherwise the game won't work.
3. Unzip the 2021.sheets.zip file, making sure that the new 2021 sheets folder stays inside the same folder as kittle.R.
4. Open kittle.R (TIP: if you've used R before, do it in a new RStudio project).
5. Highlight all the text in the kittle.R file (Command-A on Mac, Ctrl-A on Windows), and run all the code (Command-Enter on Mac, Ctrl-Enter on Windows). This will create all the dataframes and functions you need to play the game.
6. Click inside the Console box on the bottom to move your cursor there.
7. Type in any NFL player's name to get started!

GAMEDAY: Playing Kittle

After you finish the steps in the previous section, you'll have started your first game of Kittle.

• Guess a player by typing their full name.

  • You can guess any player who started one game in the 2021 NFL season, or the leading kicker or punter on each team.
  • TIP: The name must be complete, including capitalization and suffixes (e.g. "Tre'Davious White", "Odell Beckham Jr.", and "T.J. Watt"). If you get a "Player not found" message, no worries - it doesn't count as a guess. Just try a different spelling, or you can look it up in the all_players sheet.
  • TIP: If you guess a name that belongs to multiple NFL players (e.g. "Josh Allen"), you'll be asked to type in the abbreviation of the team of the player you mean to guess.

• After you guess, you will see 7 of the player's characteristics to help you find the right answer.

  • Team: GREEN means the right team, BLACK means the wrong team.
  • Conf: GREEN means the right conference, BLACK means the wrong conference.
  • Div: GREEN means the right division, YELLOW means the right conference, BLACK means the wrong conference.
  • Pos: GREEN means the right position, YELLOW means the right position group, BLACK means the wrong position group.
    • Position groups: Offensive skill (QB, RB, FB, WR, TE), Offensive line (C, G, T, OG, OT, OL, LG, RG, LT, RT), Defensive line (DT, DE, EDGE, DL, NT), Linebackers (LB, OLB, ILB, MLB, LOLB, ROLB, LILB, RILB), Defensive backs (CB, DB, S, FS, SS), Special teams (P, K)
    • The positions are from the team rosters on Pro Football Reference. All the position variants are due to PFR's data. Sorry.
  • No.: GREEN means the right jersey number, YELLOW means within 2, BLACK means more than 2 away.
  • Yrs: GREEN means the right years of experience, YELLOW means within 2, BLACK means more than 2 away.
  • College: GREEN means the right college, YELLOW means the right college conference, BLACK means the wrong conference.
    • Conferences: [Power 5] ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12, SEC; [Group of 5] American, C-USA, MAC, Mountain West, Sun Belt; Independent; [Non-FBS] FCS, D2, D3, NAIA, Canada, none

• You have unlimited guesses, and you can play as often as you want. Feel free to make your own rules for yourself.

• If you're stuck, you can guess quit to end the game and show the correct answer.

  • *secret tip*: Yes, you can look through the answers sheet as you play. You can decide for yourself if that's cheating...

THE PLAYBOOK: Future plans

• I will work on updating the game with 2022 rosters after Pro Football Reference makes 2022 the current season.

• I'll clean up the position data in the 2022 version.

• I plan to make this a Shiny app so you can play on the web (this should fix the exact-spelling headaches).

Let me know any other ways you want to see me make Kittle better.

Have fun!