You may recognise the internet’s latest fascination: Wordle. Even if you haven’t participated, the word may ring familiar. It’s a browser-based word guessing game that allows you six guesses to find the word of the day. It changes every day.
Most recently, The New York Times bought the rights to Wordle, giving the internet’s word-geeks slight anxiety about the game’s free-to-play nature. This week’s reports detail that the game will be free-to-play ‘at the time’, which puts future availability up for debate.
The Times won’t pay around $1 million for a game that it plans to offer up for mahala for an extended period of time. We can assume it’ll become pay-to-play at some point. But there may be a workaround, that we don’t recommend you do, due to… reasons.
Just right-click your Wordle
We could work in an NFT joke here, but we’re not going to.
The Verge makes a good point in a recent article, detailing how you could easily just save Wordle as a web page to your computer before the paywall is built. Aaron Rieke, a technologist, says as much in a recent Twitter thread.
“You could download a complete copy of the game right now that contains all the answers, cycles to the proper new puzzle each day, and still comes with the same “Share” button so you can share those all-important little squares with fellow players,” The Verge confirms.
You’ll even continue getting access to the new words each day, considering the words are pre-loaded into the code of the web page. If you save it to a local drive, it’ll update daily, and you’ll still be able to share your score with your friends.
Essentially, it’s: right-click > save as. That’ll save a copy of the complete web page to your machine. If you double-click on it, it’ll launch the game in a web browser as normal.
Due to potential copyright reasons, we cannot (for legal reasons) recommend anyone do the above. It’s possible to do, but you technically shouldn’t.
