The sale of Wordle to the New York Times has led to some fears that it may end up behind a paywall, but you needn't worry — since it’s possible to save the game and play offline anyway.
That’s right. Those of you lamenting the fact Wordle has sold out (which is unfair) and worried that it might no longer be free (though the NYT says that won't happen), have something to keep you going for the immediate future. In fact, it could last you for more than 2,000 days into the future, which is almost six years.
So what's going on here? Well, as Twitter user Aaron Rieke explains, it's all because Wordle is hosted as an ordinary web page — and therefore it’s possible to save a copy of the whole game as a plaintext HTML file. What's more, that copy that contains all the answers to the game, and can be cycled to a new version of the puzzle every day.
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
Plus, for those of you who love to show off your incredible success (or lack thereof), the web page still lets you share your score over social media. In fact the only real difference is that you can’t save your streaks — which isn’t exactly a major issue.
Sounds good, right? Well, it could certainly be useful if you're without internet access for a while and need your daily fix. But bear in mind that it could potentially count as copyright infringement, so we wouldn't necessarily advise you to do it.
If you do decide to do it, then it's as simple as using the 'save as' option on the open game, downloading the HTML and game files, then opening the HTML version in a browser.
Note, though, that this doesn’t seem to work on mobile devices. There’s no option to save the webpage as an html file, and my phone wasn’t able to read the relevant files when I manually transferred them from my laptop.
However, it is possible to bookmark the file once it’s open on your desktop. Provided you don’t delete or move any of the game files, that means you can open up the file like any other webpage — even when your machine is offline.
Of course being able to play Wordle each day isn't the same as beating it regularly, so you'll want to make sure you're using one of the best Wordle start words.
