‘Wordle’ Fans Are Downloading Next 2,000 Days Of Puzzles After NY Times Purchase
If you’ve been busy guessing the latest word in Wordle but haven’t caught up with the news, one thing you absolutely need to know is that the beloved puzzler has been acquired by the New York Times to join its games subscription service for a sum “in the low seven figures.”
Part of Wordle’s charm comes from its stunning simplicity; it’s a sweet personal project, there’s only one word to guess per day, and there are no advertisements.
In the buyout announcement, the newspaper assured that the game would be free “at the time it moves” into its platform, but players aren’t counting on the hope that it would stay untethered to a paywall for long.
Luckily, the game’s no-frills nature is what’s also helping fans to immortalize Wordle, as they know it. After all, when Brooklyn software engineer Josh Wardle created the site last October, he had only meant for it to be a gift for his word-loving wife. The game wasn’t intended for the public, so there was little need to use complicated code. As such, it’s currently run on a simple site where the entire answer key is stored on one page.
“So if you were to download it and run it locally, it would continue to work indefinitely,” tweets YouTube channel Tech Tangents. What this means is that all 2,135 Wordle words are pre-selected and viewable in the game’s source code, and you can simply look at it to find solutions when you’re stuck (but that’s no fun).
*cough*
— Tech Tangents (@AkBKukU) January 31, 2022
Just in case anyone cares, Wordle is a self contained site in HTML and js without any external dependencies. So if you were to download it and run it locally, it would continue to work indefinitely.
It’s pretty easy to replicate the game so you can play all 2,135 puzzles—that’s seven years of them—uninterrupted. Players are simply saving the main page as an HTML file, as well as downloading the accompanying ‘manifest.json’ and ‘main.e65ce0a5.js’ pages, which would allow them to launch an offline version of Wordle with the same interface. This setup would then rely on your computer’s time and date settings to prompt the correct puzzle.
According to Motherboard, some people have already used the source code to create bots that disclose the next word of the day. This probably won’t be possible in the foreseeable future—when Wordle eventually joins the New York Times Games tier, you won’t be able to pick it apart as the new platform would require a more complex script.
But if this all seems too techy still, you can also play it directly on a cached copy in the Internet Archive every day.
If you do download Wordle on your computer, it’s worth noting that this version will not preserve streaks nor allow you to share your progress on social media. Those are still fair tradeoffs for the guarantee that Wardle’s Wordle will live on through 2027.
Wordle is a tiny game that runs entirely in the browser.
— Aaron Rieke (@aaronkbr) February 1, 2022
The daily words are right there in the code, in a giant list. There are thousands of them.
Remember these ones?
1/x pic.twitter.com/ivca5o8tUV
Or, you can go to any "mirror" of the original Wordle website and play there.
— Aaron Rieke (@aaronkbr) February 1, 2022
For example, here's the Internet Archive's versions, which will work for a long time: https://t.co/HyodXGbVQU
3/x
[via Motherboard and IFLScience, cover photo 240384550 © Valerio Rosati | Dreamstime.com]
