While Wordle has been bought by the New York Times for an undisclosed amount, a method has been discovered to play the game offline for years to come, while still being able to share your daily results as normal.
Since the debut of Wordle in November 2021, which was meant by Josh Wardle to be used as a way of keeping in touch with his partner, it’s grown into over 300,000 users playing a day. Sharing your score to Twitter has been a big part of this, with it being unlikely to log on to the social website and not see a tweet with green and white dots.
But some users have been anxious as to how their winning streak would continue, once the buyout by the New York Times is complete. In the past, some games have moved behind a paywall, requiring you to sign up. But while Wardle mentioned in a tweet that saving your streaks is in progress, users have already found alternate ways if the dreaded scenario comes true.
However, with countless copycats having appeared on the App Store, but still appearing on the Google Play Store, there’s a risk that we could see an influx of these once the sale is complete.
A time capsule of January 2022
Across the years there have been other games that have taken off, similar to Wordle. Eventually, they either slowly faded away or were bought by another company.
Flappy Bird was one such game in 2013 before the developer took it down from both the Apple App Store and Google Play Stores. There was also Temple Run back in 2011, where there would be leaderboards between my friends and family as to how far we could run.
But Wordle has a userbase that wants to keep the daily routine of solving a word, winning the day, then sharing it with friends and family. Users have discovered that saving the page in a web browser, will also store the words that are to come for many years.
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/ivca5o8tUVFebruary 1, 2022
Launching this on Safari on my MacBook Pro 14-inch (2021) loaded up Wordle with no issues. I switched off the Wi-Fi, just in case it was trying to reach the site, but sure enough, the latest word was ready to be solved.
The only downside is that my streak is reset - but it’s a small price to pay for the changes that may be coming to Wordle soon.
I’m expecting a dedicated app to appear on most platforms - from the App Store to the Nintendo Switch in time. The New York Times will want to make the game available on more platforms than just the web. But as long as you can share those green and yellow marbles on social media, users may have no issue with this.
For the time being, Wordle is still the same as it was in December, but if you want to move to your PC or Mac to get ahead of the curve for the changes that may happen to the game in the coming months, it wouldn’t be a bad move.
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