Rejecting the cookie banner pops up a timed overlay (only appearing after you dismiss the game's onboarding guide) telling you that your cookie preferences are saved, unless you don't save cookies...
If you don't save cookies, this appears for 5 or so seconds above the keyboard every time you load the site.
A small nag, but a good reminder of the decay in user experience as soon as sites start adding tracking and similar. Wordle worked fine without this, but there's presumably little/no acquisition value in the eyes of the NYT without this tracking.
> there's presumably little/no acquisition value in the eyes of the NYT without this tracking.
I pay their $4.99/month subscription for access to their "Games" package solely because it includes access to their full archive of daily crosswords (going back to 1993).
If they add a similar "archive" of the daily Wordles and allow payed users to replay past puzzles, that could presumably provide new value to them by enticing more paying customers.
FYI, there's already an archive that's free to use. [1] Although it shows basic stats, I was surprised that it doesn't show stats on how many guesses you took.
It is so tiring to continue to see this justification for something. Just because some other unnamed thing is worse, is not a reason to be only 'a little bit bad'.
Do you think that, on its own, adding cookie popups is very user friendly and very subtle? We shouldn't explain away an action because 'someone else is worse'.
I would guess they simply applied their existing word game dictionary — probably the same one they use for “Spelling Bee”.
It doesn’t include slurs, uses US-spellings (at least in the US), and intentionally doesn’t include “obscure” words, though obviously that’s a judgement call. (Spelling Bee has an email link if you want to dispute an exclusion — I believe I helped get “ichor” added to the list.)
Fibre could be because it might annoy American players who object to non-American English spellings.
Pupal and agora I really don't get. Maybe some uneducated players would think pupal was some dirty word (related to poop???), but agora has no negative association that I can imagine.
As for the other removed words, I think it's fortunate for the Wardle guy that that list was not publicized before it got bought. That would have created a firestorm and possibly eliminated his chance of the sale.
> As for the other removed words, I think it's fortunate for the Wardle guy that that list was not publicized before it got bought. That would have created a firestorm and possibly eliminated his chance of the sale.
The word lists were (and are) in the site's javascript, readable for anyone who cares to look.
Though, I'd expect these to be moved to allowed guesses, there's some very obscure stuff in the allowed guess list.
Probably just a first pass by whoever's in charge of standards. Now I'm trying to guess if this was a simple pass with an "approved words" list, or if there was a mind-numbing meeting where they spent a day or two looking at words.
As someone from British English nation, there's no way I'm ever likely to guess FIBER unless I've exhausted FIBRE first. It breaks the brain. The ER phenomenon goes against every fibre of my being.
Also from a Commonwealth nation and I prefer the -er spelling. It looks more balanced, take the word center as an example, it plain looks nicer, and having a vowel flow onto a consonant for a hard ending means the spelling matches the actual pronunciation. I think centre at first glance would suggest a more French pronunciation - "cen-tray".
That said, I'll never forgive American English for what it did to Aluminium. The word Aluminium just sparkles and glitters like the metal itself, whereas Aluminum has a distinctly cold sound, like an echo in an empty hall early on a winter's morning.
As a Canadian I have a weird mishmash that looks right to me. I'd actually use both center and centre in different contexts. Like, the center of a circle is clearly center, but a rec centre looks better that way! (Notwithstanding the red underline my browser with its own preference is giving me...)
I don't really see the motivation for removing slurs, etc, from the available guess list in a game where you are the only one who sees your guesses. Good of them to take the words with unpleasant associations out of the solutions list, though.
The Wall Street Journal's puzzles are edited by Mike Shenk. For years - going back to when he was in college - he published puzzles under the name "Marie Kelly" (an anagram of "REALLY MIKE"). Then, one day, the people at crosswordfiend.com decided that was unacceptable - that potential female crossword designers would be put off by the fact that a man was publishing crosswords under a woman's name. And, obviously, we need more female crossword designers. As well as more female answers to crossword clues. And don't even think about publishing a crossword that has, say, FASCIST as an answer - they don't want to see such an awful word.
A lot of this game is yet to be solved- it would be rather unfortunate if one of the most useful words in a top strategy happened to be a slur, meaning that those wishing to "solve" the game would likely have to include said slur in their strategy.
None of them look great, intuitively. Actually it is kind of interesting, although unsurprising on second thought, that the removed words skew toward these harsh g and k noises which don't show up as much elsewhere in English. So they don't look like good first picks. But maybe at some point strategies will advance to having common second picks or something like that.
I would be motivated to do it. If you were a happy wordle player and also have a marginalized identity, it might suck to finally get the word right and see a slur against that identity bouncing across the screen in happy green letters. Seems to me like this makes Wordle a more welcoming game.
Imagine this scenario, you open Wordle to guess the word for the day. You put in your guesses and manage to guess it right, but it's a slur that's been used against you on many occasions and now you have to relive traumatic episodes, when all you wanted was a positive experience?
The game has two word lists -- a "possible solution" set and an "allowed guess" set. They removed:
* some words with negative connotations from the solution set
* slurs from the allowed guess set
As such, I believe there already weren't any slurs in the possible solution set. Or at least they weren't in the group of words which were mentioned as removed here. So, your scenario was already not possible.
I think removing the words with negative connotations from the solution set was a great move because, while they aren't slurs, there's no need to give people that negative experience.
The wordle code has two distinct arrays: the list of answers and the list of other words you can guess. If you carelessly remove words from the answers you will also make it impossible to guess them. I figure they removed some answers without adding them to the acceptable guesses because they didn’t think about it.
Fibre, agora and pupal are a little esoteric. Not as much as many words on the SOWPODS list, but enough to perhaps be annoying.
I'm sure it likely sold for enough that the owners can retire early and wealthy. Maybe they'd get more money serving ads, or maybe it's a fad and it dies out in a month or two. I'd rather just take the payout and move onto other personal projects, given that Wordle is pretty much complete.
That seems pretty unlikely. As a funnel to NYT games, the NYT decided this thing was worth over a million. It's very questionable whether Wardle could have extracted a million in revenue from ads on Wordle.
Do you know how much ads pay? It's peanuts. And really, the "full lifetime value" isn't much. These fads die out really quickly.
If anything, this is a win for almost everyone. Dev gets paid handsomely, code still remains available for people who care, and the experience seems mostly unchanged for people who don't.
The NYT has a games section; it brings in money that helps pay for journalism. And they've been publishing the crossword since 1942, so this isn't a brand-new idea.
Ads would've resulted in people complaining about user experience. And no one pays a full "lifetime" for anything. For an acquisition like this it's usually a multiple of 5 years of earnings. Probably more because of the popularity.
What the heck? You want the guy to run ads on the site because you don't like the NYT? Thank god he didn't do that. What was the lifetime value in your eyes? Adding popups and paywalls like many other online games? He made > $1 million dollars.
I've been working on a clean-room reimplementation that uses the original word list and is visually similar to the original, but also allows for playing unlimited puzzles each day: https://wrd.li
(The order of the solutions is different than the original, and is randomized each day.)
There are - literally, and at the moment of this post - 473 referenced Wordle clones in 118 languages. Among those 473 clones, very few derive from the original Wordle rules or layout.
You're in luck! You can view completed puzzles by clicking the grid icon in the top right, and you can copy a Wordle-style sharing blurb by clicking on an individual puzzle.
I'll take the feedback that this feature should definitely be made more obvious.
They bought eyes and personal data, probably for a steal.
But I don't bemoan the Wardle heehee guy who sold it. I'm very happy for him.
The game concept isn't unique. It just struck a nice balance of complexity and simplicity that satisfied a large audience. It reminds me of Threes game in that way.
As for the commercialization, "This is the way of things." That's fine. There will be more good ideas, and the beauty here is that we are now all free to build them with less distraction. Maybe you'll build something fun and get rich, without having to go through a FAANG (or is it now MAANG?) interview series.
I did the math on this recently. Supposedly NYT paid $3m for Wordle. The NYT games subscription that includes their crossword and potentially Wordle is $40/year. If they put Wordle behind their games subscription, they would need 75k new users to break even in one year. That seems realistic given how popular Wordle is.
I'll also speak anecdotally. As someone who has done the NYT crossword every day for several years... Wordle + the social sharing has been scratching the same itch and I've actually stopped doing the daily NYT crossword. So buying Wordle could also be protective of their existing revenue.
I think your last point is pretty solid — and since Wordle has this interesting angle of not supporting binging, there's an interesting possibility of a gentle upsell (“23 hours until the next Wordle, have you done today's Bee?”)
That's a great point. They could keep Wordle free as lead gen for their paid games subscription. That's probably more profitable than making Wordle paid.
Yeah, thinking about this more definitely makes me curious about what their targets are for this. They paid a fair amount of money up front but keeping the lights on is basically trivial.
Wait, I just played the NYT version and that word was one of my guesses, and it was accepted as a valid guess, but not the right answer. The right answer was an unrelated word with letters in common.
Is there a clone that keeps the old UI and the same answers? (Could possibly scrape the site or twitter posts to determine the answer each day) Wordle isn’t even gone and I already miss it.
It’s a complete clone of the original Wordle site (which is just HTML, CSS and JS, without any server side code), and was posted here [1] a few weeks ago.
Great idea, but this link doesn't really work -- it always has the same secret word, because the Wayback Machine injects some JavaScript to make the Date function return a constant date (try running `console.log(new Date())`).
The link posted by @rossy (with "id_") works fine though.
I used "view source" on the pre-NYT version and got a blob of minified javascript that I was able to run through a prettifier and I guess it is decipherable, but was there an earlier, un-minified version? Like every other hacker who has played it, I'm trying to write a personal clone.
The original WORDLE also used minified JavaScript, but there are some resources on reverse engineering it, if all you're interested is learning how the words are picked [1].
Ah ok thanks both of you, that suffices. I wondered why the word list was in such a weird order. Any idea if the permutation from alphabetical order is something simple? That would allow membership testing by binary search instead of needing an extra data structure.
Very interesting video. It mentions “crane” being the best opening word when using a sophisticated program. I wonder what the best word would be for a human with an average vocabulary (for a Wordle player). I think there’s a decent chance it’s not the same word because an average player wouldn’t be able to use lots of obscure words to narrow things down super precisely.
Perhaps one could create an algorithm where the list of possible words is an approximation of a human’s actual vocabulary.
This is a funny tweet, but in some sense it kind of was. It was a mostly universal, fun, communal experience that existed for a short period of time outside the pressures of the profit motive. It was valued for its use and not its exchange, it was free to everyone, and that made it a kind of small commons.
I think everyone knew that couldn’t last. It was either going to fade away or get bought. I don’t personally know anyone who begrudges the developer for cashing out (I would if I were in his shoes), but I’m still a little sad to see the fences start going up around it.
It's a completely client side implementation. You can download it and point any static webserver at it and it works. I.e. making a perfect clone of it is a minute's work and practically free to host.
So I don't agree that "couldn't last" is true. I mean zombo.com is still around, with essentially the same ongoing maintenance burden.
The code is trivial to download or even build your own, but the value of playing the same puzzle as everyone else is what’s getting paywalled. For a lot of people, the fun of wordle was solving the same puzzle and comparing notes with friends and strangers.
Agreed, I'm pretty annoyed with nyt for unnecessarily destroying that (and I do think they are in the process of destroying it). I was just pointing out that the idea it would have failed/died if they hadn't bought it is wrong.
And added trackers and a cookie popup to it, and censored the word lists (guess and solution).
And their own statement about it implied they intend to put it behind a paywall eventually (wording was something like "it will initially remain free for new and existing users").
If they want to put it behind a paywall, charge $100 a game, show Taboola links, or make people log in to a NYT account, that’s their choice. People can vote with their feet then. I just don’t get why folks are so salty. Does everyone on HN work for free?
Again with this bizarre logical nonsequiteur that because they can do something I'm not allowed to be annoyed by it. Second time in this direct chain of replies.
I don't get why people keep making this same completely nonsensical argument. Do you honestly think that whenever a company does something that they are legally permitted to do there is some obligation on everyone else to not feel any negative emotions about it? Is that how you think the world works?
I doubt you or "kertiyoowiyop" do actually think that. I suspect what's happening is that you're perfectly fine with what's happened (which is of course entirely your choice and fine with me) and you're seeing people who aren't, and because you don't share their objections you feel an urge to go around making comments to the effect of "your views are irrelevant, stop whining and deal with it", which is rude, information-free trolling.
If you think there's some actual reason I should agree with you that what the nyt's done here is fine and I have no cause to be annoyed by it then please, let's hear it. Otherwise, just accept that not everyone feels the same way as you about things.
And no, I don't work for free. I do play for free.
I think it strikes an emotional chord with the ongoing trend of private capital enclosing every social Commons it can.
While I don't think it's the right hill to die on (Wordle is a trivially cloneable public good; NYT's actual actions have been relatively mild; there are seventeen trillion bigger fish to fry) one can certainly understand a visceral reaction (violation of sanctity) when "community" bleeds into "corporation", even by the tiniest bit.
I just popped it open in Firefox Focus and haven't experienced any issues. Been using it for years for one-off browsing and its content blocker integration with Safari.
I thought it had wiped all the scores because I already played today's. But I think I must have played it during the migration period or something because it was the same word, and after getting it my previous stats are there.
The NYT Crossword minis release at 7pm PDT so everyone gets it at the same time. This way, everyone can corroborate times, talk about the puzzle, etc. if you want.
With Wordle releasing at 12am your timezone, it gets confusing when someone could be talking about the next day's or previous day's puzzle.
That doesn't fix their problem. They want everyone on the same schedule so that some people aren't getting it earlier than others. They want everyone to start at the same time.
It was a cheap game for the NYTimes to purchase (low 7-figures so probably $1-4M), it's something that people love, and it'll attract a lot of new people to the NYTimes Games brand. For now, that's probably enough. They threw a few million at someone that created something that lots of people loved and it gives the game the institutional backing to continue on indefinitely. I'm not saying that the guy wouldn't have continued Wordle, but he was one person who might get hit by a bus.
In the long run, the NYTimes has so many options - and if they decide to do nothing other than continue a game people love, it's not like a couple million is an insane sum for them to "waste" on something that puts their brand in front of so many people every day.
1) It makes people aware that the NYTimes has lots of different word game options. 2) It makes people think of the NYTimes a lot. 3) They could put a link to a single story on the page. 4) They could offer an up-sell to a SuperWordle or something as part of their games package that might offer slightly different puzzles (sure, you can get Wordle clones all over the web, but a lot of people might not care about $3-4/mo for an NYTimes Games subscription). 5) Wordle could become premium in the future - or maybe just the Sunday edition is premium.
There are so many options. Some might be less user-friendly, but there are a lot of user-friendly options. When you buy something for cheap, you don't need to leverage it a lot to justify the purchase.
New York Times Games has its own app with various word related daily puzzles. People pay a subscription fee to be able to play the back catalog of crossword for example.
Just as Atlassian bought Trello to hedge their dominant position in Kanban board hosting, NYT bought Wordle to hedge their dominant position as daily-word-puzzle purveyors.
I think hedge is the right word. NYT continuously invests in their crossword thinking there'll be a return on their investment (maybe in increased subscriptions). Investing in a line of business is basically an informed bet. NYT wants the crossword to remain dominant. They just bought Wordle on the off-chance it unseats the crossword, hence the term "hedge".
This is just speculation btw, I don't work for NYT or know the true reasons.
Not sure why people are bragging about that (this is the second such comment I saw). You could already solve in on the desktop and then "solve in 1" on your phone, of course.
It transferred over my history just fine for the month or so I've been playing. I only have Firefox Focus on my phone, which is like permanent incognito mode.
I think there is a lot to be said for the presentation, polish, how easy it is to share, and the idea that everyone sees the exact same puzzle once per day, making it viral as you compete with your friends.
Apparently the old Wordle URL redirects to the new NYT page, and it includes the statistics as a JSON in the URL so the new page know what's the old statistics is.
Ah! Thank you for this, I was wondering how they preserved the statistics through a move to a whole different site (where the old local storage of course can’t be accessed)
I find the idea amusing that exposing people's wordle scores would result in billion dollar damages. My life was ruined because someone was able to find out 60% of my wins are on 6 guesses!
Pour one out for a rare spot of joy in a dark time. I'll miss my morning Wordle and chatting about it with my friends. But I'll be damned if I go anywhere near a "news" source that gives a climate science denier a platform on its op-ed page, good puzzles or not.
I understand your concern, but newsdesks and op-ed pages aren't run by the same folks in reputable organizations - which leads to situations like the one you are describing.
If you don't save cookies, this appears for 5 or so seconds above the keyboard every time you load the site.
A small nag, but a good reminder of the decay in user experience as soon as sites start adding tracking and similar. Wordle worked fine without this, but there's presumably little/no acquisition value in the eyes of the NYT without this tracking.