Yesterday was a big day for game acquisitions. Bungie was purchased by Sony, which is all well and good, but even bigger was Wordle’s acquisition by the New York Times. Yes, the New York Times is nominally a newspaper, but it also owns several casual word/number games too, so buying out Wordle made sense.
However, due to the language used to describe the acquisition, there's some concern that Wordle might stop being free-to-play in the future. Those concerns are probably unfounded since it makes more sense for the NYT to cover Wordle in ads rather than put it behind a paywall, but if you’re worried that Wordle might stop being free-to-play, there’s an easy solution. Just right-click and save the webpage.
The idea comes from IT specialist Matt Dovey, who reminded us on Twitter that Wordle is all saved client-side, so saving the whole game is a breeze.
"Because Wordle works entirely in the client, you can just Save Page As to keep a local copy if you're worried about the NYT acquisition,” wrote Dovey. “The list of future words is already in the code, it just picks the word on the basis of your computer's date. It's everything you need.”
Wordle's code has long been dissected by tech specialists, and the surprising thing is that everything is saved locally. You can even get into the code yourself to find out what tomorrow's word is going to be. Some evil genius went so far as to use that knowledge to create a Twitter bot that spoiled people for tomorrow's word if they pasted their score on social media.
Anyway, if you just want to play Wordle yourself without going online, save the site to your computer, and then click on the html page whenever you want to play. It should work the same offline, too. Keep in mind this doesn’t get around the time lockouts for each word, and there is a limit to the word list. Once it runs out, you’ll need to go back to the original source.