Wordle will begin repeating the answers next week in a move that is sure to cause deep controversy among devotees of the game, but which I believe is entirely necessary.
The move was announced rather discreetly, in the form of a brief statement at the top of the page. New York Times‘Email newsletter about the game yesterday.
This is great news for the millions of people who play, because it completely changes their nature. Is that a bad thing? Not in my book, and I’ll explain why below, but you may not agree. Let me know what you think by voting in this poll or by letting me know in the comments below.
the memory game
When developer Josh Wardle launched Wordle in June 2021, it was based on a database of 2,315 set answers, each of which had an assigned day.
The NYT reduced that number to 2,309 after purchasing Wordle in January 2022, and then increased by an unknown amount over the next two years, with the addition of fixes like SNAFU (game #659) and OOMPH (#1,662).
There have now been 32 of these additional answers, however, there are a limited number of valid five-letter words, and I suspect that even with the NYT additions, Wordle’s word set will not have exceeded 2400. Since we are now at game #1685 for today’s Wordle answer, there were only about two more years left before all solutions had been exhausted and the game was over.
The NYT could have simply waited until then and then made a change – perhaps relaunched it as a six-letter game or something – but that wouldn’t have solved a growing problem with the way it’s played now: namely, knowledge of past answers.
Specifically, some people looked at a list of solutions already used 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 in fact it’s a game you can decide how you want to play anyway. Also, to be revealing, I am part of the problem here, because I have kept a list of all of Wordle’s previous answers for several years.
The problem is that as the answers ran out and the set of remainders shrank daily, your chances of choosing the correct word changed fundamentally, if you looked at a list of previous solutions.
For example, let’s take FREAK, the response to Monday’s game #1682. Without knowledge of the previous answers, you could well guess CREAK, BREAK or WREAK. On one lucky day, you’d get the right one, on another, you wouldn’t. Or you would have to play a word like CABLE to rule out a couple of options.
However, if you looked at the previous answers, you would see that BREAK (#172), CREAK (#347), and WREAK (#1225) have already appeared, meaning you could play FREAK right away and have an advantage over those who didn’t.
Whether this was a problem is a matter of opinion, but it certainly 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 every day” approach.
What the future holds
The NYT’s announcement that previous answers will reappear fixes all that. Take the FREAK example above: just because BREAK had appeared before wouldn’t mean it wouldn’t be the answer again, so you’d have to solve it in isolation once again.
Additionally, it extends the life of the game. In theory, it could now last forever, with games repeating over a period of between one day and six years.
However, we don’t know exactly how the NYT plans to implement this. The statement says that “we will start adding previously executed words back into play” instead of “we will add them all back and randomize them.” It could well be that the NYT takes the same approach it has for its extra words, simply selecting certain words on a given day.
You could also do it with a thematic approach, for example 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 a “what’s on the puzzle maker’s head today” one, but you might disagree.
Either way, it shakes up the game at a point where it was starting to feel a little stale. And best of all, it means I could go back to my favorite STARE starting word and have a chance to solve it in one, a feat that would have otherwise been impossible. You may have to wait a long time for that to happen…
