You’ve undoubtedly spotted the rows of colorful boxes on social media by now. You’ve probably even heard the sweet story of how the once-per-day puzzle became a global phenomenon, and even how the name of the game itself is a pun on the developer’s name.

But what you may not know is that Wordle is playing an important role fostering connection and community within many distributed teams, TEN7 included.

Wordle has struck a chord with a lot of us, especially those with fond memories of the early, simpler days of the internet. It brings joy, and doesn’t want anything from you. It’s just a nice, free thing to enjoy.

Each day is a fresh start, followed by momentary panic or a personal celebration. Win or lose, you probably share your results. It’s simple but it’s not easy. In that way, it’s pretty close to perfect. It took less than a week of exposure before we added the #wordle channel to our Slack.

Whether you’re the first one to the puzzle at the strike of midnight, or you forget about it until you see the flurry of excited chatter in the #wordle channel in the morning, our team is right there cheering each other on. We’re sharing our successes, our failures, our strategies, and even some of our favorite starting words (we’ve got a lot of fans of IRATE, STEAK, and even one fan of CANDY).

We’re throwing out clues for stumped teammates (hello, KNOLL), and making friends along the way. It’s been a really effective way for our fully remote team to connect and interact with each other, kind of like the old school “water cooler” in the office, but with more brain power and less gossip. It’s a fun and lighthearted way for both newer and more tenured teammates to organically build connections.

We’ve found that Wordle is really less about how many tries it takes and more about the journey you took, and how similar or different it was to your friends’ path to success. It’s fun, even when you don’t score well.

As my coworker Chris mused, “It will be interesting to see where this goes. I like that it’s limited to once daily, but isn’t so involved as a crossword. We’re all playing the same puzzle and we have to wait to play again (unlike so many other on-demand things and games that promote themselves as “addictive” as if that’s a good thing).”

I wholeheartedly agree! I’m not seeing any real downsides to enjoying the game as a national pastime. Heck, it’s a worldwide pastime! While not all 8 billion people on the planet are into it, I’m sure one of them!

Good luck out there, Wordlers.