How to Play Wordle Early No Matter Where You Live

For those of you a who are impatient like I am, afraid of spoilers, or are simply tired of your friends in other time zones being able to tackle the latest Wordle before you are, it can be hard to wait as the daily reset time approaches. There’s something so enticing about the game itself. We only get one word a day and six tries before we’re hit with failure. It’s no surprise then that there have been a ton of spinoffs at this point like Poeltl and FFXIV Heardle. All of them share the same basic premise and while this tip will likely work for those games as well, this guide will tell you how to play Wordle early, as soon as possible, in fact.

How Wordle Works

Since Wordle was developed by a single person, it was never really built to be as big as it currently is. When it first launched, every single answer was available right in the game’s code. All you had to do was inspect the HTML and go digging. That’s why there are multiple copies of a spreadsheet containing every answer for the next five years or so. It also means that there are no servers keeping track of the time of a daily reset like you’d expect to see with video games like Destiny 2.

Instead, Wordle resets at midnight according to whatever your computer’s time is. If you’re in the Pacific Time Zone, that means it’ll reset when it is 12 AM in California. If you’re on the east cost of the United States, you’ll get to play a whole three hours earlier.

How to Play Wordle Early

Moving your entire computer physically isn’t really possible and using a VPN to bounce your signal off of a different location doesn’t work either. Trust us, we’ve tried.

What does work, however, is the simplest solution: changing your computers clock. You can either go to the search bar and type in “Change the date and time” and click on what pops up or go to Settings > Time & Language.

While you may think to uncheck “Set time automatically,” you don’t actually have to do this. All you need to do is go down to the time zone dropdown and select Kiritimati Island, Samoa, or any of the other +11 to +14 UTC time zones. Depending on your location, this will likely send you forward to the next day, making a new Wordle available. After that, all you have to do is go to the Wordle website, play your game, and change your time zone back. You could, of course, leave your time zone in the incorrect state, but there’s no real reason to do that when it’s so easy to change.

Looking to step up your Wordle game? Check out our other Wordle coverage! Our tips guide will help you choose some of the best starting words, if that’s your thing; for those who struggle with the “Not in Word List” error, we also explain what that means here. For those of you who are somehow playing Wordle, but don’t understand why it’s so darn popular, we’ve also got an explainer for it so you finally know why it’s grown so quickly.