How the New York Times ruined Wordle

Like many students on campus, my roommates and I have a new daily activity: doing the Wordle. Even if we don’t do it together, we end up talking about it at some point during the day.

Wordle is a daily word game created by Josh Wardle that was released in Oct. 2021. Wardle created the game for him and his wife to play during quarantine, but it has now amassed millions of players.

The game is simple. Guess words with five letters, and the game will give you different colored tiles to reveal letters. Yellow means right letter but wrong spot, green is right letter right spot and a gray tile means the letter isn’t in the word. The game became so popular that the New York Times bought it for an undisclosed amount of money on Jan. 31.

If you are familiar with the New York Times, then you probably know that they have a game section. These games include the crossword, the daily mini crossword, spelling bee and now Wordle. But it seems that the game Wordle has gotten harder since the New York Times bought it. With words like “bloke,” “vivid,” “moist,” “cynic,” “tacit” and “rupee” making appearances in the past few Wordles, it has become harder to guess the word.

It could be because the New York Times has a schedule throughout the week for their crosswords that could have transferred over to Wordle. The crossword puzzles get harder as the week goes on, so Monday is usually easy, and Saturday is hard. But that is not what Wordle is supposed to be about.

Wordle is supposed to be a fun, stress-free, daily word game. I like it because it gets my brain moving in the morning and helps me feel more prepared for the day, not to mention I have to keep my streak. But with words like those listed above, it feels like a chore at times.

I still enjoy doing it, but it doesn’t have the same flare as before. Many others share these sentiments as well. People talk about the Wordle on TikTok and other social media apps to share their frustrations or their wins.

I argue that the New York Times should go back to the roots of Wordle, the simple, random generated game that is fun and stress-free. I recognize that the words for Wordle are randomly generated, and the words listed above would’ve probably come up eventually: however, there was a sudden spike of these harder words from the time the New York Times bought it to now.

These harder words, while expanding vocabulary, increase frustration levels and make the game feel more like a chore than a game.