Wordle 557 3/6
STALE
LINER
IMPEL
Wordle 558 4/6
RATIO
SALON
BAYOU
HAVOC
Not an easy one. I think I only got it in four because I was watching a YouTube video about Gypsy Rose Lee. (The theater geeks will get it.)
Wordle 558 4/6*
SNORE
TOPAZ
VOCAL
HAVOC
Fourth try was kind of dumb. I forgot to check positions of the known letters.
Wordle 558 4/6
Slant
Chore
Macho
Havoc
Wordle 558 5/6*
BEARD
FLOAT
WAGON
SAVOY
HAVOC
Wordle 558 4/6
CRANE
TALCS
MAGIC
HAVOC
Wordle 558 4/6
CRITS
PLACE
NACHO
HAVOC
Looks like a 4 kind of day.
Wordle 558 4/6
SLANT
CHORE => after this, thought I had it down to MACHO and MOCHA
MOCHA => but clearly overlooked something…let’s go back and try
HAVOC => and let slip the dogs of Wordle!
Wordle 558 4/6
ASIDE
CHART
MOCHA
HAVOC
Some thoughts about the home game
My wife bought the Wordle home game, and we played it for the first time last night. The idea is pretty simple: on each round, one person chooses the solution, the others try to guess it, with the chooser looking over each person’s guesses and placing clear green and yellow tiles on the letters, as appropriate. The number of guesses for each person on each round is recorded, and after each person has been the chooser once, the results are totaled, and the low score wins.
This wasn’t a factor last night, but I realized that it can go haywire if some players choose easier words, and other players choose harder words. Suppose Players A, B, and C choose easy, middling, and challenging words, respectively. When Player A is choosing, B and C both get 3’s. When Player B is choosing, A and C both get 4’s. And when Player C is choosing, A and B both get 5’s. So A scores a total of 9, B gets 8, and C wins with a 7.
You’d really either need a shared understanding of how easy or hard you all wanted the words to be, or (better) if you had enough people, have one person just be the chooser throughout, and that way all the players would be solving the same words.
There are only a couple thousand answers. The designers could have printed a couple hundred per page in a 10-page pamphlet, grouped by difficulty. Add in some dice and you’re good to go.
At the start of each round, roll for difficulty. Each answer person then rolls and looks up the answer for that difficulty.
Unfortunately it’s not a do-it-yourself project. It would require real work to group the wordle answers by difficulty. Not doing that is where they dropped the ball.
Wordle 558 5/6
Tough nut today
HEART
HAPPY
HAWKS
HANGS
HAVOC
Wordle 558 3/6*
TIRED
BACON
HAVOC
Yesterday was a loooong day for me (7 hours in a car bookending a 6-hour visit with family), so “Tired” just leapt to mind.
Wordle 558 4/6
LOUPE
RATIO
BACON
HAVOC
Add me to the Four Club.
I guess it depends on what level of precision you feel you need. I’m perfectly happy with considering (a) just how familiar and ‘everyday’ the word is, (b) are the letters high or low frequency or somewhere in between, and (c) is there anything obvious that would throw someone off?
last night, I started off with CRASH: very familiar, high-frequency letters, nothing weird. Second time I chose, I went with BRING: also very familiar, but G is down in the middle of the pack in terms of frequency, and B is well below the middle. Intuitively, it should be harder than CRASH.
I guess for the few hundred solutions since NYT bought the game from Wardle, they could tell you the average number of guesses it took people to solve them, and that would be a more solid metric. But they only have that data for those few hundred words, not the entire list.
Wordle 558 5/6* 12/29/2022
IMPEL → Hopefully those eliminations will help later…
ROAST → Two vowels and no consonants through 2. Do I dare a double consonant with my next guess?
ANNOY → I do, but only helps a little, and not at all for the double. So I noodled around on the keyboard a bit and tried a few non-words of the form -A-O-, then…
WAHOO → Which I wasn’t expecting to be a Wordle word, but since it was, -OH is a rare ending in English (though not in Chemistry) so it must be HA-O-, which with a little Shakespeare knowledge leads to
HAVOC
I wish Wordle had a button for “is this a valid word?” as well as for an outright guess.
I see where you’re going with that, and yeah, that could be both doable and good enough. I can envision how, even, and it wouldn’t be particularly difficult or time consuming. (Assign point values to letters based on how frequently they show up in the answer list, sort words by total point value, arbitrarily split the list into however many evenly-sized groups you want.)
I’m wondering if having a printed list of all 2000 confirmed wordle answers grouped by difficulty would be too spoilery. Would you hate looking a word up in such a setup? I think I might hate it.
I suppose, then, that part of the strategy of playing that game is coming up with words that are harder for your opponents to guess.
Ugh. Today was no fun. I was distracted and not on my game – as becomes obvious below!
Wordle 558 5/6*
IRATE
CHEAP
COACH
ANCHO
HAVOC
I had the hardest time separating that ‘C’ and ‘H’. In my mind, they had to be together. With my third try, I stupidly tried both the ‘C’ and the ‘A’ in positions I already knew the didn’t belong. When I finally pried them apart, the answer came at last.
Tomorrow will be a better day. (I hope!)
Wordle 558 4/6
SHEAR
HANDY
HABIT
HAVOC