Wordle Postgame Report, CATCH up: July 14-16

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.

July 14, LIVER, 6/6

A PUZZLE SETUP as unfriendly and repetitive as Prometheus' vulture. GROUT got a yellow R; RAISE got a yellow R, I, and E. That ruled out any consonant combination leading into an -IE-, so the vowels would probably not be touching. FIRED? The I and E went green around a yellow R. That meant the R went to the end, which created the frame _ I _ E R, which meant the answer could be—just about anything. A double chute, with three guesses left. BIKER wasn't it. Two to go. MINER? No. Last chance. I saw LIVER, I tried LIVER, and LIVER it was. A reckless finish, but fate said today was not my day to pay the PIPER.

July 15, WEDGE, 5/6

INTERESTING FRUSTRATION GAVE way to boring frustration. FREON got a yellow E, then YEAST turned the E green. And there things got hung up for a while. It didn't look like much of a frame to work with, but somehow almost nothing fit; with O and A already gone, it wasn't immediately clear what could fill up the three letters after the E. The I just wouldn't slot in there properly: MEDIA—no, that needed the A. BEING—no, the N was already out. LIEGE would put the E in the wrong place. What about that -GE ending, though? A second E was in play...aha, LEDGE! The structure clicked into place. But only the last four letters turned up green. Damn, OK, fine, HEDGE. Again, gray on the front. How many -EDGE words were there to work through? The S for SEDGE had been out since round two. Oh: WEDGE. That pried open the final piece of green.

JULY 16, ROOMY, 3/6

AFTER A WEEK of narrow chutes and blind endings, some space to work freely. PROVE put down a green O and a yellow R to move around it. GLORY placed a green Y, and, since the R stayed yellow, placed that one by elimination: R _ O _ Y. The unknowns were well separated from each other, rather than crowding together. Too many people had somehow put coverage of the Real Housewives of New York in my peripheral vision—my younger kid was curious about a poster about it and I had to spend multiple blocks of his walk home from camp trying to explain my mostly thirdhand understanding of the TV show to him; I don't even really know if the Real Housewives do, like, game-show challenges or just Kardashian their way through situations, or what—so I had to keep shoving RHONY out of my brain to think clearly. Not many plausible consonant combinations start with R, so that first opening would be a vowel. AO didn't seem plausable, either. I? A specious IRONY briefly clicked into place, till I remembered that the R would be wrong. R-vowel-O-something-Y, so that second something would be a consonant. Double the O: ROOMY. All green, with three whole unused rows below it.

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