Meet the Wellington couple behind hit Wordle-inspired game Hang Five

Wellington-based husband-and-wife team Arun and Amy Stephens have created Hang Five, a Wordle-inspired puzzle game. Photo / Arun Stephens

Wellington couple Arun and Amy Stephens' love of Wordle and Connections - and airport puzzle books - inspired them to create their own word game, Hang Five. Here, Arun tells the Herald’s Bethany Reitsma how it came to life and became a daily ritual for puzzlers not just in New Zealand, but around the world.

If you’re a keen Wordler, crack Connections daily, or enjoy any of the countless variations on the New York Times' popular word game, you’ll be interested to know there’s a Kiwi-made game in the same vein.

Wellington software developer Arun Stephens and his wife Amy, who works in the public service, are the brains behind Hang Five, inspired by Hangman - the paper-and-pencil guessing game you probably played at school.

The idea for the game, sparked by a love of puzzles both online and on paper, came when the couple were on holiday in Indonesia.

“We play Connections and Wordle every day,” Arun tells the Herald.

Hang Five was inspired by the guessing game Hangman. Photo / Zemobo Limited

“We went on holiday almost two years ago now and took some puzzle books that we bought at the airport along with us and then had an idea - could we make something as catchy as Wordle?

“While we were there, we came up with some ideas and wrote down ‘sort of like Hangman’ - because Hangman is classic, everybody knows it.

“When we got back, that’s when I put fingertips to keyboard and started a prototype.”

Hang Five is a strategic word game in which players have to guess five themed words by filling in the letters. First launched in August 2023, it’s recently hit a million plays from users in New Zealand, the US and the UK.

It took a few goes to get right - the first iteration of the game was “too easy”, Arun says.

“It originally was going to be five words, but we’d give you one letter to begin with and you could sort of figure it out.

Arun and Amy Stephens were holidaying in Lombok, Indonesia when they came up with the idea for Hang Five. Photo / Arun Stephens

“I tried it out with my friends - we’re in a group where we share our Wordle every morning - and they thought it was a bit too easy.”

Another version where players couldn’t choose any vowels until the end was deemed too hard.

“But then when I made it, ‘Okay, you can choose vowels, but it will cost you a life’, that was just the right level of difficulty.”

Just like Hangman scribbled on a piece of paper, the player guesses letters one by one to fill in the blanks. If you guess a wrong letter, you’ll lose one of five lives.

Using a vowel will cost you a life, so unlike Wordle, it’s best to start with commonly used consonants like T and R.

“The trick is to not use vowels, because otherwise you lose lives too quickly. Once you’ve found all the consonants, then the vowels are free and you win,” Arun explains.

Hang Five is inspired by the pencil-and-paper game Hangman. Photo / Zemobo Limited

Each night, the couple come up with the next day’s puzzle together - “usually in front of the TV” alongside their cats and dog.

“Both of our mums say that we should have more figured out than we do,” he jokes.

“Last night we were watching The White Lotus, so it’s sort of related today. When we go on holiday, friends kind of have an idea of what the themes might be because of what we’re up to.”

The most difficult theme to date was “Tom Hardy roles”, he says - just 6% of players solved it.

Why Tom Hardy? “We had been bingeing Peaky Blinders.”

With timely themes that appeal to a wide range of ages and interests, the game has found a fan base of puzzlers around the world.

It’s been played a million times by about 21,000 people, around 3400 of whom play every day. Most of those are New Zealanders, with around 800-900 from the US.

Hang Five has hit one million plays since launching in 2023. Photo / Zemobo Limited

“That’s where it becomes a bit of a challenge - do we choose words that are New Zealand spelling or American spelling? We’re going to try and keep it as Kiwi as we can as long as we can,” Arun says.

It’s that sense of locality that resonates with their audience.

“We get emails, not too often, but it’s always people that really enjoy playing it. On Waitangi Day, we included ‘treaty’ as one of the words, and someone from New Zealand said, ‘It was only because of today’s theme that I realised you guys are based in New Zealand'. And it was really nice, she just said ‘Thank you for making it’.

“And sometimes we get messages from people from other parts of the world - we got a really nice one from a guy from America, from New Jersey last week, and he was just saying he didn’t know the word because it isn’t used in US English very much, but it was good to learn it.”

The puzzles go live at midnight, and Arun says there’s a visible peak in users from 12am to 1am each day.

“Sometimes we forget or sometimes there’s been a bit of a computer bug and I forget to press a button or something and we get messages from people like ‘Oh no, it’s not working' - so yeah, people really enjoy it as being part of their daily routine.”

The game is currently monetised with ads, which Arun says cover the costs of making it.

“We’re looking at doing a premium version at some point which lets people get rid of the ads and play the archive, because there’s about 550 games that we’ve made, which is crazy thinking about it.

“If it takes us three minutes to come up with a puzzle, then we’ve spent over 24 hours coming up with puzzles over the last 18 months.”

According to New Zealand’s online encyclopaedia Te Ara, word games such as crosswords and other puzzles have been widely played in Aotearoa since the 1880s.

Wellingtonian Simon Shuker, whose parents first started creating crosswords including New Zealand-specific and te reo Māori words in the 1980s, developed the Code-cracker and Take 5 puzzles, now played all around the world.

You can try your hand at Hang Five here or get the app on iOS or Android.

Bethany Reitsma is an Auckland-based journalist covering lifestyle and entertainment stories who joined the Herald in 2019. She specialises in telling Kiwis’ real-life stories, money-saving hacks and anything even remotely related to coffee.