I played this game in college with my roommate, on paper of course because it was 1976. The game then was called Jotto. The way it worked is each of us wrote down a 5 letter word which is the secret word. Then we would take turns to see who could guess the other guy's word first by using 5 letter words as guesses. It is kind of like playing Battleship with letters. So Wordle is not new, although the name of the game might be.
By the way, you can download free versions of the game (called different names of course) that allow you to play again and again. I have been using one called Wordlee for my iPhone which is pretty good. But there are a few others.