Technology
PUBLISHED
1
With the hot new word game Wordle being sold to the New York Times, people have been concerned that they may lose access to it or their beloved winning streaks.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.The creator – software engineer Josh Wardle – sold the game to the giant for a seven-figure sum at the end of January. In a statement, he said that the game will remain free, while the New York Times said it would "initially" remain free, prompting some to speculate that the game may be paywalled in the future.
Since you're here, we're going to go ahead and assume you're a Wordle fan.
But fear not, there is a way to keep Wordle free for yourself, by storing the original game – Wardle's Wordle, if you will – complete with 2,000 days worth of puzzles to keep you ticking over for the next five years.
"Just in case anyone cares, Wordle is a self-contained site in HTML and is without any external dependencies," one tech writer explained on Twitter. "So if you were to download it and run it locally, it would continue to work indefinitely."
Essentially, the site runs entirely on your end of things. When you load the site (www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/) you are loading all of the puzzles that Wardle has created so far with it. Your computer's time and date settings tell the site which puzzle to load (that day's) and that's how you get your daily puzzle.
It's simple, and it has an added bonus: if you make a local copy of the (surprisingly small) site, you can then play it until Wardle's Wordle puzzles run out.
You just need to jump through one small hoop (Wardle's Wordle Hurdle, if you'll excuse me). Go to the usual Wordle site and click "save page as" in your browser, saving the page as an HTML file. Clicking the file should open the game in your browser. You can then continue to visit the page every day, safe in the knowledge that there'll be a new puzzle waiting for you for a long time.
Alternatively, if you find the idea of downloading a wordle copy a little too "hackerman" for your tastes, you can simply go to an archived version of the page and bookmark it. Happy Wordling.
