The NYT bought Wordle, but you can make it yours by simply downloading it

Wordle, the deceptively simple word game that captured our minds and spawned a thousand clones, has another interesting property you may not have considered: it runs entirely client-side.

What that means is that the game's entire code, and all of the puzzles, are there in your browser when you open it at www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/. And if you go to File - Save Page As (in Chrome, but all browsers offer this functionality), and save it somewhere, you can open that file and continue to play. Yes, even if you're offline.

Even better, all of the game's options like Dark Theme or Hard Mode, will work in this downloaded version of the game. Your progress, however, will not be saved.

This was never really a secret, but it's safe to assume that most people didn't know it until it was shared by Aaron Rieke (via The Verge) on Twitter. As he points out, you don't even have to download the page; you can go to a mirror of the Wordle website — like those kept on the Internet Archive — and play the game there.

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This is good news given that Wordle was recently sold to The New York Times, which keeps most of its content behind a paywall. And even though the Times said the game would initially remain free, if that changes sometime in the future, you'll always have the "old" Wordle.

And just a heads up, this could be a grey copyright area, so don't use it for commercial gain.