Newsletter

Wordle Postgame Report, October 26

GAMES OF SKILL AND CHANCE DEP'T.

Tom Scocca

Oct 28, 2022 — 2 min read

Bordeaux, FRANCE: Municipal employees carry away ducks from an open air basin following a municipal ban on birds in the city, 27 October 2005 in Bordeaux. The UN food agency today strongly criticised pre-emptive bans on poultry imports to prevent the spread of bird flu, saying they FLOUT established rules and do not distinguish between infected and non-infected countries. AFP PHOTO.PHOTO PATRICK BERNARD (Photo credit should read PATRICK BERNARD/AFP via Getty Images)

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, not playing Wordle, or of the New York Times.

October 26, FLOUT, 5/6

THERE WAS A moment, as the opening play of TOUCH turned up yellow in the first three squares, that it looked like the game would go easily. Obviously the yellow TOU- would be an -OUT ending. The H for SHOUT was already gone. So: SPOUT. No, it wasn't SP-. What other two-letter openers were left? Aha, it had jumped to the endgame so fast, I hadn't even run through the vowels: ABOUT? Nope. It didn't seem worth it to try to be systematic; again, how many answers could be left? GROUT. Not GROUT, and now the double-wide gray was looking more and more like a chute. TOUCH had ruled out CLOUT. The appealing answers were all off the board, as far as I could see. It was FLOUT, or—they woudn't dare—KNOUT, the thing people get whipped with in czarist-era Russian fiction. Or something else. Prudence, long-neglected prudence, said I should abandon the chute and test as many letters as possible, in case I was missing some other option. I didn't feel like following the rules of safe play. FLOUT.

The Wordle Postgame Report will be posted semi-regularly on the website of the Indignity newsletter, and on Popula. If you enjoy reading the Wordle Postgame Report, please subscribe to Indignity to support the writer in doing this and other things that would be hard to justify at a salaried day job. Thank you for reading!