How I Uncheated at Wordle

I have no interest in cheating at Wordle. Sure, the answers are stored client-side and easily accessible via the source, but it's no fun to look at the answer key. And I take the game seriously enough that when my statistics were tainted during the NYT's cutover from powerlanguage.co.uk to nytimes.com, I was disappointed! You see, the night of the cutover my wife and I were playing Wordle at the same time as we often do but she guessed the word correctly first so I let her watch my progress. As she looked at my phone screen, she couldn't hide her confusion. She knows I never want any hints and she was trying so hard not to say anything but she finally told me that the hints I was receiving from the game were wrong!

I didn't know what to do with that information! How could this be? It took me 6 guesses, but I did finally guess the word correctly. To our surprise though, my wife and I each had a different correctly guessed word! I did some googling and found that it was the day of the site cutover and soon realized that my browser had not refreshed, though hers had. This meant that my browser was using the old answers and hers was using the new answers. Once I refreshed my browser, I was redirected to the new version of the site and it offered me a fresh Wordle puzzle. I was still in a state of surprise and for some reason decided to confirm what I was seeing by guessing the word she had solved previously as my first guess. This of course was the correct answer and I received a generous but undeserved compliment of 'genius' from the game. (I tend to think that a more accurate compliment would be 'psychic', but whatever.)

Once I realized what was going on, I remembered that I had tainted my statistics such that it showed I had won 1 game in 1 try. (Sorry for that mouthful of a sentence.) Perhaps some people would be glad to have such a statistic but I would rather track my statistics accurately so I decided to find a way to fix this.

My initial guess was that the statistics were probably stored in cookies in my Chrome mobile browser, so after a bit of research on how best to perform analysis, I decided to connect my Android phone to my Ubuntu laptop. The first step for this setup was navigating on my phone to Settings>About and tapping 7 times on the Build number option to magically enable Developer options. Then I navigated to System>Developer options and enabled USB debugging. After connecting the phone to my laptop via USB, I pulled up the Chrome browser on my laptop and navigated to chrome://inspect/#devices.

The interface for debugging in this way is quite elegant. There is total control over the phone's browser, including full remote display, remote control, and developer tools. I did have some intermittent issues with it not working, but I was able to solve those by updating my laptop's Chrome to the latest version.

My first order of business was to examine the cookies so I clicked 'inspect' next to the Wordle tab and navigated within the developer tools to Application>Cookies. I didn't find anything of interest there so next I took a look at the the browser's local storage, also under Application>Cookies. There I found the nyt-wordle-statistics key which stores the statistics:

To my satisfaction, I was able to arbitrarily edit my stats. First, I changed it to be that I had won 1,337 games on my first try, just for a fun screenshot (at the top of this post). Then I set my stats to be more accurate. Problem solved!