I would have guessed that Wordle is already infringing the patent of Mastermind. (almost same rules, just with letters from "real" words instead of colors).

But it turns out that Mastermind is "inspired" by an old pen-and-paper game called Bulls and Cows

So if you are worried just generalize the mechanisms slightly and add new dictionaries to create a "new" game. °

°) For instance: I was thinking of adapting perlglossary, one would need a way to incorporate words of different length and starting position. :)