Off Beat
MBTAdle has all the guesswork of the MBTA, but none of the delays or shutdowns.
A new T-themed Wordle spinoff launched this week, and just like the real MBTA, it requires some guesswork and perseverance.
MBTAdle challenges players to rely on their transit prowess to figure out a specific route between two stops using three trains and a couple of transfers. Players get six tries to guess correctly, same as the original Wordle.
Bonus: No shuttles or delays.
MBTAdle is the work of Madeleine Barowsky, a 27-year-old software engineer who lives in the Boston area and has an interest in transit and maps.

“The game that this is based off of is called Subwaydle, and it’s the same game but for the New York City subway system,” Barowsky explained in an interview. “And I play the game regularly and was talking about it with a friend. She said, ‘You should make it for Boston.’”
That was last week, heading into Thanksgiving. By Wednesday, the game was live.
MBTAdle uses Subwaydle’s open-source code, though Barowsky said she had to make a few creative decisions to account for Boston’s unusual transit system — the sheer number of branches, for example.
Another quirk, according to MBTAdle’s rules of play: “You cannot use the Park St / Downtown Crossing concourse to transfer, simulating the difficulty of doing so in real life.”
There’s a new puzzle every day and tens of thousands of possible permutations — “it works out to like 99 years of continuous MBTAdle,” Barowsky said.
She said the feedback has been positive so far, with some suggestions about how to improve the game’s logic to better match how riders would think about the T.
“I definitely plan on tweaking it until it feels totally done for me,” Barowsky said. “Like last night, I added the same feature that Subwaydle has where you can see a visualization on the map of Boston of the trip that you took. There are a few other things on my to-do list.”
In a follow-up email, she said she hopes players enjoy the game and, “in getting to know the system, feel empowered to learn about current and upcoming projects, engage with the MBTA when they solicit feedback, and advocate for the changes they care about.”
In the meantime, any tips for first-time MBTAdle players?
“Make sure that you’ve looked at the map beforehand,” Barowsky said, adding, “If you don’t recognize the name of the station, it might be on the Green Line Extension.”
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