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The magic behind Wordle is, of course, that there’s only one puzzle a day. Combined with the ease with which players can paste their spoiler-free results to social media and group chats, it’s that the whole world is all playing the same puzzle, the same day, that makes it so alluring. But screw that! You can now play the entire archive.
Part of creator Josh Wardle’s motivation for keeping the game to one puzzle a day, and not making an app, was his desire that it not take over people’s lives. And then it went and took over the world. (Then he cashed out.) And as noble as his intentions might have been, of course there are many who would love to spend an idle bus ride, or dreary wait in a dentist waiting room, playing the neat little game over and over. Maybe not more than anyone else has played, just the experience of the lucky few that have been following along since the game’s surprise release back in 2021.
Wardle has made no efforts to hide or protect the code running Wordle, no matter what the New York Times has planned. But now, even better, it’s been made possible to go back in time and play through the previous 229 puzzles.
Wordle Archive is the work of computational biologist, Devang Thakkar. He’s done a neat job of replicating the original format, while making it his own, and it allows you to easily click through to play any puzzle uploaded earlier than today. In keeping with the general spirit of the thing, it’s all open-source, with the code. Just how long free and open projects like this can continue once the NYT takeover is complete remains unclear.
That Josh Wardle is now a rich man thanks to the neat little puzzle game he made for his partner is a wonderful thing. That he did it with a game on which he refused to advertise, despite millions of players around the world turning up every day, was damned respectable. That the New York Times paid a seven-figure sum for an open-source game that just flat-out rips off bewildering beyond comment.
Either way, for now at least you can finally go back and play all those Wordles that happened before you first stumbled on the phenomenon.
Never got to the sixth row before. Man alive.
And as you can see, it still lets you copy and paste your anonymized results for public glory. Or un-glory in this case. If you’d like some to tackle the huge backlog available in the archive, check out our guide!
Since the enormous success of Wordle, many other games have followed in its wake. Best amongst them are the numerical Nerdle, country-guessing game Globle, and versions that allow you to simultaneously solve multiple Wordles, Quordle and Octordle. All are free, and all work in your browser, whether on PC or mobile.
If you want to read more about the best and worst starting words to use in Wordle, check out this article. And if you want to play one of the various clones that have popped up since Wordle took over the world, we have a full list of the best ones
