Head Tale

Wordle is the latest craze to sweep the online world.

If you haven’t played, you get six chances to guess a five letter word.  After entering your first guess, it will tell you if you have a letter in the right spot (green) or a right letter but in the wrong spot (yellow).

Then, sort of like a combination of the old board game, Mastermind and the TV game show, Wheel of Fortune, you have to use the process of deduction to guess the correct word using different words that may fit the pattern before your six guesses run out.

The game was created by a British-born, New York-based software engineer named Josh Wardle whose wife loved word games (even Wordle was named as a pun on the surname of its creator) Wardle was previously the creator of other viral hits such as Reddit’s “The Button”.

Wordle took off late last year, possibly after a mention in the New York Times along with the ease of sharing a pictogram of your results on social media:

There are a few things that contribute to Wordle’s unique popularity:

* Instead of allowing people to binge the game like they do with streaming media, social media feeds and other common distractions during the pandemic, the game only releases one single puzzle every 24 hours (along with a countdown timer until the next puzzle is released for the truly addicted.)

* It also keeps record of how many guesses it took you to solve the puzzle (1 row to 6 rows) and your streak of correctly guessing the puzzle which gets broken if you don’t solve it in six tries.

* Unlike a real-world game (eg. Scrabble), you have to visualize possible words in your head rather than being able to “juggle” tiles to get inspiration.

* On that note, you have to enter your guesses in letter order.  So you can’t “place” the letters you know are correct then “try” letters around them to figure out what the word might be.  So for example, on today’s puzzle, I ended up with an “I” as the second last letter and also knew there was an “A” in there somewhere which actually made it harder to guess the word (which Shea got and blurted out so I “got” it too!) 😉

* In that last example where I only knew there was an “A” and an “I”, I was trying a strategy mentioned by @patdubois on Twitter to use a vowel-heavy word (AUDIO) as your first guess. But I’m not sure if that’s the best strategy for how my brain works.  I need a mix of vowels and consonants to help me sound out what the word might be.

* Before trying that strategy, I would start with a word that had a lot of the most common consonants (“tread” was a common one I used for my first guess). (Think of the most common letters that always used to get guessed first in Wheel of Fortune.). And hey, one strategy article I read said I wasn’t far off with picking a good first word…

* Someone else in another strategy thread suggested “AIRED” is a good mix of the most common vowels and consonants.

* Actually, there are lots of theories about great first words to play.

* There are also different strategies whether you want to win fast or maximize your chances of winning.  Most people keep guessing words based on the letters they already know are in the solution while others will ignore that at first with a goal of clearing more possible letters “off the board”.

* Oh, another complication is that the word you’re guessing could have duplicate letters so you have to keep that in mind.  I guessed “Gauge” correctly but that one almost flummoxed me and took right to the last line.

* There are lots of other strategies and hints being shared online you might want to check out.

* There are also sites that document past “words of the day” but I’m not sure how quickly today’s solution gets added so I wouldn’t look at that page unless you’ve already done today’s puzzle or you might have the answer spoiled.

* And unfortunately there are also a lot of copycat versions popping up as well seeking to profit from the original which has been put out for free use by millions of daily players which is probably another key to its popularity.

[Edit: How big of a craze is it?  Google has changed their logo so that when you search for “Google”, it does a “Wordle”-esque transition to their company name!]