Wordl, the popular five-letter word guessing game is now everywhere. The overnight success has seemingly taken over social media feeds and family group chats everywhere as people share their scores. Despite its popularity, there’s something you might not know: it has a hard mode that you can toggle on and off. So yes – there are technically two ways to play Wordl.
If you play for the first time, the game’s default settings have hard mode disabled. Hard mode doesn’t change the type of words you see, but rather the letters you can use to guess. when you play Wordl
Under the normal rules of Wordl, You can guess any word at any time. In hard mode, you can start with any word, but are then limited to subsequent guesses by the clues. For example, if my first guess was “GAMES” and I received yellow tiles for the letters G, A, and S, I would need to include those letters in my next guess. I couldn’t guess “VIDEO” but I was able to guess “SAGGY” because the word saggy contains the letters G, A, and S.
Depending on how you play Wordl, you may have played it naturally using the hard mode rules. It may seem like you’re more likely to guess the last word given all the previous guesses. However, if you already have three clues, playing this way means you only get feedback on two letters at a time – so that makes it harder.
How to enable Wordle hard mode
To enable hard mode, click the settings icon (it looks like a gear) in the top-right corner. This brings up a screen that lists the settings for the games. The first entry is “Hard Mode”. Click the button to the left of it to toggle the mode on and off. If it’s green, then it’s on. If you want to play around with it, don’t worry; You can turn it on or off at any time, even mid-game between estimates.