How to turn Wordle’s hard mode off and on

WordleThe popular game of guessing five-letter words is now all the rage. As people post their scores, the overnight hit has taken over family groups chats and social media pages. You might not be aware of the hard mode it has, despite its widespread popularity. So yes — there are technically two ways to play Wordle.

Play for the first time, the game’s default settings have hard mode turned off. Hard mode doesn’t change the kinds of words you see, but changes what letters you can use to guess. When you play WordleYou can enter any five letter word and the game will provide clues based on what word you have guessed. A green letter means it’s the correct letter in the correct spot of the word of the day. A yellow letter means the letter appears in the final word, but it’s not in the right spot. Polygon has published a list of words that our staff start with.

These are the usual rules WordleYou can pick any word you like at any given time. You can guess any word you want to begin in hard mode. However, the hints limit your ability to make subsequent guesses. For example, if my first guess was “GAMES” and I got yellow tiles for the letters G, A, and S, then I would have to include those letters in my next guess. I couldn’t guess “VIDEO,” but I could guess “SAGGY,” since the word saggy contains the letters G, A, and S.

It all depends on your style of play WordleYou might be naturally following the rules of hard mode. It can seem like you’re more likely to guess the final word by incorporating all the previous guesses. However, if you already have three hints, playing this way means that you are only getting feedback on two letters at a time — so it makes it more difficult.

How to turn on Wordle’s hard mode

Click on the settings icon in the upper right corner to enable hard mode. It looks similar to a gear. This will bring up the settings screen for each game. The first entry is “Hard Mode.” Click the button to the left of it to toggle the mode off and on. If it’s green, then it’s on. You can play with the system at your leisure, and you can even disable it in middle of a guessing game.