Wordle will start repeating answers next week in a move that’s certain to cause deep controversy among devotees of the game – but which I believe is wholly necessary.
The move was announced in a rather low-key fashion, in the form of a brief statement at the top of the New York Times‘ Gameplay email newsletter yesterday.
This is massive news for the many millions of people who play the game, because it completely changes its nature. Is that a bad thing? Not in my book – and I’ll explain why below – but you may well disagree. Let me know what you think by voting in this poll or letting me know in the comments below.
The memory game
When Wordle was launched by developer Josh Wardle in June 2021, it was based upon a database of 2,315 set answers that each had an assigned day.
That number was whittled down to 2,309 by the NYT after it bought Wordle in January 2022, and then increased by an unknown amount over the next couple of years, with the addition of solutions such as SNAFU (game #659) and OOMPH (#1662).
There have now been 32 of these extra answers, however, there are only so many valid five-letter words, and I suspect even with the NYT’s additions Wordle’s word pool will not have been above 2,400. Given that we’re now on game #1685 for today’s Wordle answer, that left only around two more years before all of the solutions had been used up and the game would be over.
The NYT could simply have waited until that point and then made a change – maybe relaunching it as a six-letter game or something – but that wouldn’t have solved a growing problem with the way it’s now played: namely knowledge of past answers.
Specifically, some people were looking at a list of already-used solutions when solving each day’s puzzle. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, because nothing in the rules says you can’t do that, and indeed it’s a game that you can decide how you want to play anyway. Plus, full disclosure, I’m part of the problem here – because I’ve maintained a list of all past Wordle answers for several years.
The issue is that as the answers got used up and the pool of remainders shrunk daily, it fundamentally changed your chances of picking the right word, if you did look at a past solutions list.
For instance, take FREAK – the answer to game #1682 on Monday. With no knowledge of past answers, you might well guess CREAK or BREAK or WREAK instead. On a lucky day, you’d get the correct one, on another, you wouldn’t. Or you’d have to play a word such as CABLE to rule out a couple of the options.
However, if you looked at past answers you’d see that BREAK (#172), CREAK (#347) and WREAK (#1225) have all appeared already – meaning that you could play FREAK right away and have an advantage over those that didn’t.
Whether this was a problem is a matter of opinion, but it undeniably made Wordle less of a level playing field – which, after all, was part of the idea behind the game when it launched with its ‘everyone plays the same game daily’ approach.
What the future holds
The NYT’s announcement that previous answers will now appear again fixes all of that. Take the FREAK example above: the fact that BREAK had appeared before wouldn’t mean it might not be the answer again, so you’d be left to solve it in isolation once more.
Plus, it extends the game’s lifespan. Theoretically, it could now last forever, with games repeating over a timespan of anything between a one-day and six-year period.
However, we don’t know exactly how the NYT plans to roll this out. The statement says that “we will begin adding previously run words back into play” rather than “we’re adding them all back in and randomizing them” – it could well be that the NYT takes the same approach that it has for its additional words, just picking and choosing certain words on a given day.
It might also do so with a themed approach – for instance, making CAROL the answer on Christmas day or similar. I hope it doesn’t do this, because it should be a puzzle-solving game rather than one of ‘what’s in the puzzle-setter’s head today’, but you may disagree.
Either way, it shakes the game up at a point at which it was beginning to feel a little stale. And best of all, it means I could go back to my favorite ever start word of STARE and have a chance at scoring a solve-in-one, a feat which would otherwise have been impossible. I just might have to wait a long while for that to happen…
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marc.mclaren@futurenet.com (Marc McLaren)
