My Kingdom For A Streak

Because I’m a LeBron fan, when it comes to Wordle, I care more about longevity of sustained greatness (i.e. my perfect streak of winning games) than I do about having epic individual performances (i.e. having a lot games where I’ve won in 2 or 3 guesses). That means I need a way to keep my statistics even if I move between devices or need to replace one.

It turns out (at least as of this writing, who knows if the NYT will change it) that statistics are stored in a simple JSON object in browser local storage. On a laptop this storage is easily manipulated using DevTools, and on mobile it’s a bit tougher but still not too bad, at least on Android.

Both of the above, however, rely on GUIs. It got me thinking if there was a scriptable approach. First, I found a Python library (natch) that can speak the Chrome DevTools protocol. Then I had to figure out how to use it to read and write to local storage. That wasn’t too hard (even though the example here is in Node, the technique was portable). Finally I needed to make the library connect to both a laptop-based browser (easy), and my Android phone via adb (not so easy). Luckily I stumbled on the correct magical incantation in this post. Put it all together, and boom, I can now backup my Wordle streak, and easily transfer it between devices, using a script:

import chrome_local_storage

laptop_storage = chrome_local_storage.ChromeLocalStorage(port=9222)
phone_storage = chrome_local_storage.ChromeLocalStorage(port=9223)

wordle_stats = laptop_storage.get('games/wordle', 'nyt-wordle-statistics')
phone_storage.set('games/wordle', 'nyt-wordle-statistics', wordle_stats)

Want to see how I did it? Well, you’re in luck, because I packaged up my implementation and published it on PyPI. The source code is also on Github. Enjoy!