Whoa! We have a time traveler among us.
So… Who will our next president be?
That’s interesting, as I’ve only been playing since February, and I already feel that they are more esoteric. You played at random, but perhaps the first 250 were the most common (and not so random?).
I played all the words in order of when they will be on the New York Times site (unless they change). And I checked my average by “quarter” (578 words per quarter) and my average in each quarter is within .02 guesses.
And the website does say “time machine”. But, I’m not giving words or who the next president will be. Sorry.
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No defeats yet but my streaks end if I forget to play or this weekend when I’ll be out of town. I don’t refer to any list of past puzzles, to me that’s a little like cheating- if you know the previous solutions you can eliminate them from your guesses.
Today’s was pretty easy.
I wish the answers could repeat.
Agreed.
I regret I lost my first game after maybe 500 plays. Had reduced it to PA-ER with two guesses left and several letters gone. Didn’t even think about R since many other choices seemed more likely. Meh.
212 Wordles without a loss. I got a late start, so I’m sure that others are past that number! All comments here assume Hard Mode. I am guessing most people by now have missed a few wordles, and I guess I’d ask: Was it because there were too many vowels left to choose from, or too many consonants to choose from? Did you have a lot of free spaces to make guesses? Or not enough?
The answers to those questions are the exact reason I’d never start with two vowels in a word. Yes. It’s exciting to get two letters really fast, and feel like you’re closer to victory! But . . . you have rushed yourself into removing a space or two that you could be using to figure out if it’s stare, stale, stake, stave. . . just a random example, but you get the point.
My starting word is BLAHS, (like, “I’ve got a case of the blahs.”), and I have enjoyed getting a good start on eliminating mid-frequency consonants early. When I get no letters on my first guess, I’m pretty happy. Five letters eliminated, and lots of spaces left to guess. If I get like… a yellow S? My next guess will be SCENT - again, a mix of common and mid-frequency consonants, and a single vowel.
You will never… ever… lose wordle because you took too long to figure out a vowel. You MAY very well lose wordle because you got your vowels too fast and put yourself in a box. I’ve been able to find almost nothing written about this, which has struck me as strange.
Thoughts?
Yep, I agree. I start with second tier consonants and only a single vowel, ideally CLAMP but I rotate through different variations. (Crimp, clomp, cramp, etc…) But I do it for the reasons you say.
I feel like I came up with it organically, but then when I went to post it in one of these wordle threads (I think this one) I saw somebody else had already posted it, even going so far as to recommend CLAMP specifically, before I even knew what wordle was. So it seems pretty clear to me that I read that post and internalized the idea as original to me, and that my memory of how I came up with it myself is faulty in an “alternate ending of Big” kind of way.
The way I remember it, the SHA_E (DKLMPRV) trap shook me, so I started thinking I should lead with “trap letters” instead of the most common letters in order to short-circuit traps going forward.
My strategy tries for the win in three, meaning I only get up to 10 letters to check, so yes, I definitely appreciate no hits on the first word. My favorite result for the first word is probably one yellow consonant. Then my second word ideally checks two vowels and three common consonants, but of course fewer if the first word hit some letters. CLAMP STORE would be my ideal starter if nothing hit from clamp.
My only loss came in my 199th game, around a month ago: HUNKY. I never check any of those letters in my first two words unless forced to, and then ended up trapped with _UNKY.