Damn ! I’m a Failure.
Wordle 270 X/6*
BEARD
LARGE
RAISE ← stupid boy. The E can’t be there !
WAFER
PAPER
TAMER
A surprisingly difficult one to finish.
I got four correct letters in the wrong locations on my first guess. I placed them all in the right locations with my second guess. And then it took me three guesses to find the first letter. Those rhyming words can be a trap.
Yeah you may have something there about not going aggressively for the vowels. A strategy I’ve considered is going after digraphs and trigraphs, instead of vowels.
Some digraphs are: SH CH TH WH CK PH NG
Some trigraphs are: NTH SCH SCR SHR SPL SPR SQU STR THR
I like your thinking.
You couldn’t have had it in 3. One letter in your third guess was in a known wrong position. (Not intending to nit pick – I’ve done the same.)
For my third guess, there were several possibilities, but I picked the one that was, in my view, the most common word. I think that needs to be factored in when you are missing only one letter and there are multiple possibilities. For those who were missing only the first letter, or like me, only the middle letter, I think there were far fewer likely answers than possible answers.
In rereading, this struck me as a tactical mistake. You had two research guesses and three possible dup letters that could only be checked in the first position. Each research guess should have used up one dup check.
Better would have been EIGHT, leaving C, M, (R), (T), W. Then, uh, TWICE? No, actually, that wouldn’t be better. It still only checks 3 letters per word, leaving a 50-50 guess for your final try.
Hmmm…
…I would cheat a little: Cut down the list of possibles by applying meta knowledge, eliminating GATER (is that even a word?!) and MATER, and maybe also RATER as markedly less common than the rest. That leaves C (E) H (R) (T) W, which would be easy enough with two words. EARTH/TWICE comes to mind.
Wordle 270 5/6
Toughie today after a good start. 3 tries on the first letter.
HEART
RATED
LATER
WATER
CATER
Meta knowledge…?
I’m another knocked out of my streak (46) and my 100% (farewell!) by #270:
Wordle 270 X/6
STARE
TREAD
AFTER
LATER
WATER
HATER
Ouch!
Quite annoyed at tomorrow’s puzzle.
Wordle 271 5/6
Knowledge about the game from outside the game. We know from articles and news stories that answers aren’t plurals that end in s. We know the guess list is around 8000+ words but the answer list is only 2000+ because the author heavily curated it to make sure the answer words would all seem fair to his girlfriend, who he wrote it for. We also know that one analysis showed TRACE to be the optimal starting word. This is all meta knowledge.
If you use the blurred word as your opener every day, you could say you’re ‘playing the meta’ the same way if you roll up the flavor of the week overpowered build in an MMORPG, you’re said to be playing the meta.
By contrast, I think CLAMP is the optimal starting word based on my experience playing the game, not by any formal analysis outside of it.
Tomorrow’s Wordle, Today
Wordle 271 6/6
Wordle 271
CRASH
POLED
BOOZE
MONTE
MOXIE
MOVIE
I don’t know why I went with my fifth choice rather than the more common word.
Exactly like mine.
You are correct that none of those “ATER” words are in the answer list.
Did much better today (3) then yesterday (another of those, 6) - but still undefeated. And this one was harder?
Wordle 271 4/6*
SWEAT
PRIME
MINCE
MOVIE
Happy with a decent par after a short run of birdies.
Wordle 271 4/6
CLAMP
STORM
MOUND
MOVIE
I saw a 5 and a 6 so I got scared and reused my top starter. After my two research guesses I still had no clue so I had to burn a third, which fortunately narrowed the choices down to one. At least, I could only find one.
It was one of those words that I don’t consider “hard”, it just relies on getting lucky. Hard words are ones that are difficult to think of, they stretch your vocabulary. It was easy to come up with words that fit for today, whether you chose the correct one or not comes down to luck.
Fair enough. Words that end in four letters with eight possible first letters, two of which could be repeated letters elsewhere in the word, are hard.