Nobody ever said Wordle would stay the same forever. The New York Times announced that Wordle now has a dedicated editor at the helm, pulling it more in line with its other game properties like the famous Crossword and Spelling Bee. “After nearly a year of speculation, it will finally be our fault if Wordle is harder,” the announcement ominously declared.
Now that there is a person taking charge of Wordle’s direction, the game’s daily solutions will more likely deviate from the predefined list of five-letter dictionary words that had been running the game automatically since inception. Outside of a few editorial decisions The Times made to strip out individual words that were expected to be distasteful or controversial, the list has effectively gone untouched as its popularity has ballooned in the last year. That’s going to change.
The description of how much the list will change is, of course, vague. “The game will have a Times-curated word list and will be programmed and tested like the Spelling Bee and the Crossword,” the announcement reads, “… answers will be drawn from the same basic dictionary of answer words, with some editorial adjustments to ensure that the game stays focused on vocabulary that’s fun, accessible, lively, and varied.”
At the same time, the indication seems to be that while the answers may be chosen and adjusted in terms of the order they come up as solutions, the overall list of available words broadly spanning the dictionary will not: “While the answer list is curated, the much larger dictionary of English words that are valid guesses will not be curated.”
There is one substantial change that we know is going into effect and will impact how you play Wordle: plurals of words that simply add an “s” or “es” to the singular word will no longer be considered as Wordle answers. So, words like “foxes” or “boats” will never be the answer moving forward. Plurals that don’t append an “es” or “s” will still be included, such as “geese” or “fungi.”
While that change could adjust your strategy, especially in later guesses as the number of available letters decreases, it may not completely upend how you start Wordle. A word like “foxes” or “boats” will still be accepted as a valid guess, and letters will still be appropriately marked yellow or green if correct. It will simply never be the final Wordle answer.
Keep these changes in mind the next time you go to play Wordle! Don’t spin your wheels on quick-choice plurals you know can’t be answers, and focus on using a good diversity of letters to further narrow down the solution.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.