Thursday, March 28

Puzzle panic: Fans say Wordle is ‘broken’ after two right answers on same day


The Wordle of the day is “broken.”

Puzzle players were left at a loss for words after a purported glitch resulted in them getting two different answers for today’s game. The fiasco comes a week after Wordle migrated to the website of the New York Times, which bought it from creator Josh Wardle in January for an “undisclosed” seven-figure sum.

For the uninitiated, the “Wheel Of Fortune”-esque brain teaser allows players six guesses to determine one new five-letter word each day. However, according to flummoxed Wordlers on social media, players were getting two vastly different “right answers” for Wordle 241, which we won’t spoil for you here.

“Hang on, hang on. There are TWO different Wordle answer today?” wondered one baffled vocab enthusiast on Twitter. Another spluttered, “Uhoh!! My partner and I got 2 different correct words for #WORDLE today. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”

One critic mused, “The day that divided Wordle. Are you team [redacted] or team [redacted]?”

A NY Times glitch has left Wordle users with different words today, and social media is up in arms.
A NY Times glitch has left Wordle users with different words today, and social media is up in arms.
@zantareous/Twitter

One disillusioned Wordle die-hard lamented getting the harder of the two answers. “Waittt there are two different answers for todays wordle and I happened to get the harder one?????? what a p–sstake,” they vented.

One user tagged the New York Times Twitter account to say, “you seem to have broken #wordle.”

Explanation from the NY Times.
Explanation from the NY Times.
@mikeyslezak/Twitter

Fortunately, several users were able to explain the discrepancy, which they’ve chalked up to the fact that there are two different iterations of Wordle.

“Wordle game 241 was actually two different games, depending on which version of the site you’re using,” Caitlin Welsh, a Wordle enthusiast and editor for Mashable Australia, explained.

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As such, stragglers playing the game on the original Powerlanguage page got a different word than those using the NY Times site.

The Times explained in a tweet that they’d removed the original word for being too obscure, writing: “We are updating the word list over time to remove obscure words to keep the puzzle accessible to more people, as well as insensitive or offensive words,” Cohen said in an email. “***** is an example of an obscure word.”

However, while the Times might not have been at fault in this instance, the publication was previously accused of ruining Wordle by making it “too hard.” Despite the criticism, the rag claims that “nothing has changed about the gameplay” since the takeover.

In addition, Wordle was allegedly hacked following the acquisition, with the code-cracker reportedly divulging the game’s algorithm and posting spoilers for nearly 120 upcoming words. The tech expert who tweeted his findings may have been onto something: So far, as of Monday, Feb. 14, the answer reveals have been correct.



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