How to Play Past Wordle Puzzles

Missed a few days, or want to work through the back catalogue? Old Wordle puzzles are still playable — but the routes have narrowed considerably since the New York Times took over, and most of the “free Wordle archive” links floating around no longer work.

Past Wordle puzzles card showing a calendar grid with one day highlighted

Here’s what actually exists right now.

The official NYT Wordle Archive

The New York Times runs its own archive covering every puzzle back to the start. It’s the only source guaranteed to serve the genuine, correctly-numbered puzzle for a given date.

  1. Sign in to your New York Times account.
  2. Go to the Wordle page and open the Wordle Archive from the Games menu.
  3. Pick a date from the calendar and play it exactly as you would today’s.

This requires an NYT Games subscription. The daily puzzle stays free; the archive is one of the features the paid tier exists to sell. If you already subscribe for the Crossword, you have it.

Archive results don’t affect your daily streak, which makes it a genuinely low-risk way to practise.

Why the free archives keep disappearing

For a couple of years, several third-party sites hosted playable copies of every past Wordle. The best known was a community-built archive that reconstructed each day’s puzzle from the original word list.

Most are now gone. The NYT has issued takedown requests to clones and archives since acquiring the game, and the sites that remain tend to appear and vanish on a timescale of months. That’s the honest picture: we’re not going to list specific archive sites here, because any link would likely be dead by the time you read it, and half of what’s left are ad-heavy clones of questionable provenance.

If you find one that works, treat it as temporary.

What you can do for free

Play the unlimited clones. Several open-source Wordle implementations let you play endless randomly-generated rounds. They’re not the real past puzzles — the words won’t match any particular date — but if your goal is practice rather than completing the historical record, they do the job perfectly well and there’s no subscription involved.

Use the answer archive as a self-test. Take a word from our past Wordle answers list, have someone else pick one at random, and play it in any clone that lets you set the target word. This gets you the genuine historical answers without needing the NYT archive.

Try the variants instead. Octordle, Quordle, Dordle and Squaredle are all free, all daily, and all have their own back catalogues. If the appeal is “more Wordle” rather than “that specific Tuesday in March”, these scratch the itch at no cost.

What doesn’t work any more

Changing your system clock. This worked on the original browser version, which calculated the puzzle from your local date. The NYT version fetches the puzzle from the server, so rolling your clock back now just gives you today’s word with the wrong date attached — and can corrupt your local stats.

Clearing site data to replay today. It wipes your streak and statistics, and still serves you the same word you’ve already seen. There’s no upside.

Old archive bookmarks. If you saved a third-party archive link in 2022 or 2023, it’s very likely dead.

Frequently asked questions

Is the NYT Wordle Archive free?
No. It needs an NYT Games subscription. The daily puzzle remains free to everyone.

Will playing archive puzzles break my streak?
No. Archive play is tracked separately from the daily game.

Can I still change my device date to replay old puzzles?
No. The current version pulls the puzzle from the server, so the trick no longer works.

Where can I see old answers without playing them?
Our past Wordle answers archive lists every solution we’ve published, free and with no account needed.

Are the free Wordle clones the same puzzles?
Usually not. Most generate random words rather than replaying the official sequence, so they’re for practice rather than completing the record.

More Wordle guides