Fans of the viral word-guessing game, Wordle, were initially concerned that its new owner, The New York Times, may make the game inaccessible for those who have become addicted to their daily dose of guesswork.
As Aaron Rieke, Managing Editor of Upturn, explained on Twitter, however, there is a way to download the game and play for years to come… all for free.
“Here’s something lovely: We’ll all be able to play OG Wordle *together* for years to come. And it will be easy to do,” Rieke tweeted.
“Wordle is a tiny game that runs entirely in the browser,” Rieke continued. “The daily words are right there in the code, in a giant list. There are thousands of them.”
Wordle is a tiny game that runs entirely in the browser.
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
— Aaron Rieke (@aaronkbr) February 1, 2022
“So you could save copy of the website right now, *unplug your computer from the internet,* and play Wordle every day for years,” Rieke explained.
Even if users were playing on offline versions of Wordle, Rieke noted, “we’d still be playing the same words at the same time.”
“We’d continue to share the same experience. We’d even accrue our own stats (on a per-site basis),” he said.
Here's the really cool part: Even if we all played on different "mirror" sites, we'd still be playing the same words at the same time.
We'd continue to share the same experience. We'd even accrue our own stats (on a per-site basis).
This isn't hacky, it's just the web.
4/x
— Aaron Rieke (@aaronkbr) February 1, 2022
“Effectively you can keep a version of the game as it exists today with enough data to keep you going for a long time,” Professor Alan Woodward, a computer scientist from University of Surrey, said, according to the BBC.
“As you have the words stored locally it might be tempting to cheat, and where’s the fun in that?” he added.
“The sudden hit Wordle, in which once a day players get six chances to guess a five-letter word, has been acquired by The New York Times Company,” The New York Times reported earlier this week. “The purchase, announced by The Times on Monday, reflects the growing importance of games, like crosswords and Spelling Bee, in the company’s quest to increase digital subscriptions to 10 million by 2025.”
“Wordle was acquired from its creator, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, for a price ‘in the low seven figures,’ The Times said. The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players,” the report added.
“The Times remains focused on becoming the essential subscription for every English-speaking person seeking to understand and engage with the world,” a company statement said. “New York Times Games are a key part of that strategy.”
Wardle said that he built the game after he and his partner “got really into” The Times’s crosswords and Spelling Bee games during the COVID-19 pandemic, and was initially designed not to seek financial gain, but to provide a distraction during lockdowns.
“New York Times Games play a big part in its origins,” Wardle said in the company’s statement, “and so this step feels very natural to me.”
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.