In recent months, I’ve started every day with the same ritual: I roll out of bed, fix a cup of coffee, and play Wordle.
I was, I think, a little late to the party: it’s nearly a year since the New York Times bought and published Welsh developer Josh Wardle’s wonderful little brain game for nerds, and I became intrigued precisely because I saw everyone else posting their daily game on Facebook.
Who does this? I wondered at the time. I used to play Words With Friends, a kind of mobile Scrabble, and I can’t imagine for the life of me posting either a winning or losing game board for all the world to see. On the other hand, Wordle is a game one plays alone – but even so, isn’t a bit like gloating?
Not at all, I quickly learned.
Wordle, for those who’ve been hiding in a rain forest somewhere, is a brainy guessing game where you have six tries to guess a five-letter word. I suppose it’s sort of like that Wheel of Fortune thing on TV, where the idea is to guess letters on a hidden board and have hits and misses. But in Wordle, it’s always five letters and you only get six tries. And you only get one play per day, which keeps you from getting obsessed and burning out – and everybody in the world is playing for the same word, which increases the bonding factor.
Why is it not gloating? Because for every game where you get the word in two or three tries, there will be a reciprocal game where you take it all the way out to five or six – or lose the game altogether.
Now, I was quickly hooked, as you might guess. Being a wordsmith and all, I assumed I’d be quite good at Wordle. And I suppose I’m okay, but what I have found is that Wordle is no place for hubris; the game can humble even the mightiest master of English.12
It’s like major league baseball: every team’s gonna win 54 games, every team’s gonna lose 54 games, and it’s what you do with the middle 54 that determines how good you are. Well, every Wordle player’s gonna get a few 2s, and everyone will get a few 6s. The trick is to be on the high side of the middle – to get more 3s than 4s. That became my mission.
A typical game looks like this:
The Word of the Day here is SQUAD. I started with my usual starter word, AROSE, and got out-of-place hits on the A and the S, eliminating ROE. Then I tried PASTE, which eliminated PTE, and gave me two more wrong positions for the A and the S. I went with SHACK next, figuring the A had to be in position 3, and was surprised when that turned out to be wrong. I got the S in position 1, which was a huge help: now I knew I needed a word that started with S, with an A in position 4. SQUAD was all I could think of; the only other possibility was SALAD, but I already knew position 2 couldn’t be A.
Isn’t this fun?
Solving in four tries is a par, it seems. You feel good when you solve in three, and if you get it in two, you’re having a really good day:
This was ASKEW – easy to get to, since I started with AROSE that day, and had the A right and out-of-place hits on the S and the E. But I got lucky; it could have been ASHEN or ASSET.
My personal best is this one:
The word was AROMA, and I had started with AROSE, so I was almost home already.
I get my fair share of 3s, which is what I’m generally shooting for. They look more or less like this, which is this morning’s:
TRAIN. I started with ABIDE, went to STAIN, then TRAIN. Easy peasy!
But I digress. The point here is to underscore how we all end up bonding over this ritual, with no trace of competitiveness. And the reason is – it's insidious. There is no path to social domination here, no secret or method by which one can rule; the English language is just too damn cruel.
Here’s what I mean: there exist in our tongue a great many words that have five letters, and four of them are the same, and in the same positions! When it comes to that, you’re down to really guessing – no strategy will help you. It’s a coin toss at that point.
Here’s what I mean. In the game below, I went all the way to the sixth guess, and had three letters correct from the second one! But with two missing letters, it wasn’t exactly a crap shoot, so I was still clinging to the life raft of strategy:
The word was SMELT, and with S and E and T in the right spots, I still have many possibilities – SCENT, SPENT, SPELT, SWEAT, SHEET, SWEET, SLEET, SWEPT, SLEPT. Lots of letters to eliminate. Getting the L (in the wrong position) on turn five took it down to two finalists, and I lucked out.
But here’s where the game gets really cruel: you get a word like this:
It’s SNOUT. And on turn three, the S and the OUT are in place. That leaves three tries to nail the right word from five possibilities: SNOUT, SHOUT, SCOUT, SPOUT, STOUT. At that point, it’s luck-of-the-draw.
And it can be crueler still. Suppose you get your four-out-of-five on the second turn:
The word here is WATCH. The possibilities are BATCH, CATCH, HATCH, LATCH, MATCH and PATCH. That’s just mean.
I lucked out the day the word was SHAKE, and the other possibilities included SLAKE, SNAKE, and STAKE.
The point is this: with its oh-shit factor that can kick in at any time – the luck-of-the-draw final guess when there are too many possibilities – Wordle combines knowledge, strategy and dumb luck in such a way as to make us feel good while keeping us humble at the same time. Under such conditions, it becomes easy to share our morning fun with friends, because they can relate with immediacy to both the highs and lows. It’s become our new neighborhood softball game – tons of fun, nothing’s at stake, and we’re all in it together...
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