"Wordle," a strangely compelling word game (Part 1)

[Bullitt]

@Briny_Deep

Confession time. I am using word lists and Excel filtering to maintain my streak.

Confession time. I’m using my brain to maintain my streak. Which means I’m not as efficient and effective as @Briny_Deep!

[Ponderoid]

@Briny_Deep

“RENDS” seemed the most plausible although “REINS” would have made as much sense or more.

Remember the mnemonic, “I before D in letter frequency.”

[Atamasama]

@StarvingButStrong

I get this tiny spark of proprietary pride every time someone lists their solution starting with MY suggested word.

You do rock.

I totally stole it from you.

[RickJay]

Fairly easy today.

[pulykamell]

Three today:

ADIEU
STROP
REBUS

[needscoffee]

I got it in 4.

I opted to not go with @StarvingButStrong’s word, to mix things up a bit, but if I had, I might have been able to guess it in 3 tries. That’ll teach me!

STARE
RELIC
REUSE
REBUS

[Riemann]

Was your third guess a mistake? You know that’s not possible after your first guess, right? There could be a second E, but not in 5th position.

[Riemann]

@Bullitt

If I start by playing 3 well-chosen words then ideally I should have all 5 letters flagged green or yellow in the game.

The best strategy will not be some fixed set of three words. The optimal second guess will depend on what’s correct in the first guess.

And in “hard” mode, you cannot have a static strategy - for your second guess, you must improvise a word that contains the most likely remaining letters but also incorporates the correct letters from your first guess.

[needscoffee]

@Riemann

Was your third guess a mistake? You know that’s not possible after your first guess, right?

Not a mistake.

[thorny_locust]

I haven’t put the settings into hard mode, but I have been playing that way. It just seems to make sense to my head.

I’ve also been changing the first word around; it seems less fun to me to use the same one over and over. I try to include at least two vowels and at least a couple of the more common consonants; though I went by my guess of most common, I didn’t hunt up a list.

I’ve been getting mostly threes and fours. Luck may be involved.

[GuanoLad]

My starting word turned out to be the perfect choice, because I got it in two.
Game 196:

RADIO
REBUS

[thorny_locust]

Oh yes: Jan 1st:

HEART
REPLY
REBUS

[Bullitt]

@GuanoLad

My starting word turned out to be the perfect choice, because I got it in two.
Game 196:

RADIO
REBUS

What? Or are you whooshing us?

Your second word could’ve been any of these

REAMS
RENTS
RESTS
RUNTS
RULER
RULES
RUMPS
RUSTS
RUSTY

Your starting word wasn’t perfect. You made a lucky guess.

[RickJay]

Or dozens more words. That’s a really lucky guess.

The perfect opening guess, without actually guessing it right away, would have been the interim word that got me there:

RUBES

[CairoCarol]

It has occurred to me to try to play strategically in terms of what letters are most common, but I have a feeling that the distribution in this game is different. I’ve only been playing a very short time and there have already been 2 or 3 answers with Y in the final slot. I’m guessing that for whatever reason, that happens a lot in this game.

[Railer13]

@Bullitt

we see the 15 most frequently used letters are, in order,

E A R I O T N S L C U D P M H

@Bullitt

Are there three 5-letter words that exhaust all 15 of those letters?

PLUMS
ACHED
NITRO or INTRO

[GuanoLad]

@Bullitt

Your starting word wasn’t perfect. You made a lucky guess.

Well, they’re all guesses. This was an educated guess, it was the word that sprang to mind with the vowels I had left.

[hajario]

I got skunked for the first time

STARE
REAMS
RENOS
REEDS
RECKS
REFIS

[Robot_Arm]

@Briny_Deep

Suppose the word is “kudos” and I type “duped.” I might expect both D’s to be highlighted yellow, because that letter is present, and where I positioned them, neither is more correct than the other. Turns out it doesn’t work that way, true, but it might have.

My brother and I played Mastermind when we were kids. As someone posted upthread, that used colors instead of letters, and the hint that you got after each guess told you how many of the colors in your guess were correct, but not which ones they were.

We played the game enough to have a pretty standard strategy. A first guess would be something like:

RED RED RED GREEN

If the hint was one white peg, that had to mean that the GREEN was the right color in the wrong position, and there were no REDs in the solution. If the hint was black-white-white, then one of the REDs was correct and the other two were in the wrong position. Basically, you stepped through each color in the guess; it either generated a black peg (correct) white (wrong position) or nothing (that color is not in the solution). We got pretty good at it.

Turned out were were playing it wrong the whole time. I made a friend in college, and somehow we got to talking about this game. His method of generating hints was completely different. I think he stepped through each color in the answer, so once he’d given a black peg for one RED in the guess, the other two REDs got nothing. We managed to find a copy of the game, and by a close reading of the rules, my friend was correct.

But yes, how you encode the hints for double colors (or double letters) is not necessarily obvious.

I like Wordle as a game, but I hate the UI. You have to enter your guess from left-to-right. Why? If I know the first, third, and fifth letters of the solution, I want to type those in the boxes first. Then I can visualize what other letters might fill in the blanks. I think it’s very poor programming not to allow that.

[hajario]

@Robot_Arm

If I know the first, third, and fifth letters of the solution, I want to type those in the boxes first.

Yes! This frustrates me as well.