Wordle Postgame Report, CATCH up: August 4-7
GAMES OF SKILL AND CHANCE DEP'T.
August 5, BUGGY, 4/6
The Wordle Postgame Report is a brief analysis of a game of Wordle, the five-letter-word guessing game now owned by the New York Times. If you do not play Wordle, Indignity encourages you to please skip this item. The existence of the Wordle Postgame Report does not constitute an endorsement of playing Wordle, of not playing Wordle, or of the New York Times.
MAYBE THE AUTHORITIES of Oceania had a point about ignorance being strength. FLACK turned up all gray, and then SPORE likewise turned up all gray. Ten letters guessed, zero guessed correctly. The vowels were running low: HUMID? The U was green, everything else was gray again. Fifteen letters guessed, fourteen wrong guesses. I had almost no positive knowledge about the word—but because of that, I'd swept the keyboard map more than halfway clear. I couldn't see any three-consonant clusters to follow the U, so there almost certainly had to be a Y at the end. The answer could still be TUBBY, but BUGGY seemed the safer Wordle play. It was. I'd worked through the possibilities in the dark, almost algorithmically, without a single glitch.
August 6, ALIEN, 3/6
PROSE GOT A yellow E. DEITY got a green I, with the E still yellow. It didn't seem like much progress until I tried to find a next move—any next move at all. Either the answer started with E or it had an IE in it. Neither one seemed to go anywhere. My mind kept bouncing around to FRIED, impossible for two different reasons, and EVITE, not a real word and also impossible. QUIET? Again, the T was gone. With R and T already gone, there weren't many consonant pairs that would fit in the first two spaces. I kept staring at the screen, and at the word skeletons I'd written on the scratch pad. If not two consonants, a vowel? A? A, as in...ALIEN? The little green word turned over, after coming from somewhere far, far away.
August 7, SMEAR, 4/6
IT SEEMED LIKE a good start with STORK: a green S and a yellow R. Where did the R belong? SCRAP kept it yellow, but added a green A. The answer wasn't going to start with SR, or at least if it were going to start with SR, I couldn't begin to think of what it would be. So: S _ _ A R. SH-? SHEAR? Four green letters and a gray H. SMEAR wiped away the gray, with a solid streak of green.
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