Players of the online game Wordle have reported different solutions to Tuesday’s edition, prompting speculation that the puzzle has changed since it was bought by the New York Times late last month.
The addictive word game become an internet craze last year and is now thought to attract nearly 3 million daily players across the world. It was secured by the US media group from creator Josh Wardle for an undisclosed seven-figure sum.
But several Wordle players on Tuesday found their solution to the puzzle was different from those of family and friends.
“Same day, different Wordle. Is anyone having a different Wordle of the day too?” one Twitter user asked.
“My girlfriend and I play wordle most mornings,” another wrote. “Today we both got it on line 3, but - the word was different”.
The confusion appears to come from a change to the Wordle URL. The internet game is played in the browser and was originally hosted on powerlanguage.co.uk. Last week the New York Times took over the site and moved Wordle to nytimes.com.
However, some users have yet to migrate to the new URL, which led to differing answers among players on Tuesday and highlighted a change in game play.
Players have also complained that it is getting more difficult to guess the target word. “It must be a coincidence, but the NY Times puzzles are hard and suddenly Wordle has questionable words,” author and columnist Anna Spargo-Ryan tweeted over the weekend.
The New York Times denied any changes have been made to Wordle since the acquisition. "Nothing has changed about the game play," New York Times communications director Jordan Cohen said in an email to the Guardian.
Wordle was originally devised by Josh Wardle, a software engineer from Wales and living in New York, to entertain himself and his partner Palak Shah. Players have six chances to guess a five-letter word. On each attempt they are told which letters are in the right position and which are found at different places in the answer.
Wardle recently spoke of feeling overwhelmed by the game’s viral success. “It going viral doesn’t feel great, to be honest. I feel a sense of responsibility for the players. I feel I really owe it to them to keep things running and make sure everything’s working correctly,” Wardle said. – Additional reporting: Guardian
