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Wordle Postgame Report, weekend CATCH up: September 23-25

GAMES OF SKILL AND CHANCE DEP'T.

Tom Scocca

Sep 26, 2022 — 2 min read

A woodblock engraving depicting The Hand of GLORY: used by robbers as an evil spell to make people motionless. The hand was removed from the carcass on a gibbet and used to hold a candle made, from, among other things, the fat of an executed criminal. Dated 18th century. Photo: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

September 23, GLORY, 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, not playing Wordle, or of the New York Times.

IT SEEMED BOTH tactically sound and fun to start with SCAMP, but it got no results. The slow start continued with BLEND only getting a green L. OLIVE and anything starting with AL- were out, so there had to be some kind of consonant combination at the beginning. The M for GLOOM was gone; what about FLOOR. Or FLOUR? The game was at the point where avoiding a double letter seemed irrational. FLOOR. First O green, second O gray, R...yellow? Nothing begins with RL-. That made _ L O R _ . GL- for the front, -Y for the ending. Not a heroic or admirable performance, but good enough.

September 24, GRATE, 3/6

I TRIED A hearty, juicy helping of vowels in MEATY, and sopped up a green -AT- and a yellow E. The E might move to the front, but nothing came to mind that way, or it could go to the end, to make a nice, solid -ATE ending—which meant, despite its being a clump of high-frequency letters, the possibilities to complete it shouldn't be endless. The two empty spaces would be an opening consonant pair, unless Wordle stooped so low as to use ELATE for an answer. Was it PLATE? It was not, so it was not anything else with a P or an L in it. Was it GRATE? Green from end to end. Three easy strokes had shaved off all the little bits of necessary information.

September 25, ADMIT, 3/6

MY ARM STILL ached from the booster shot, but my sleep had felt less uncanny. My eye fell on Steven W. Thrasher's book The Viral Underclass, and VIRAL made its way into the word game. You do you, as they say on the anti-masking subway posters that replaced the masking ones. Yellow I, yellow A. Try them somewhere different: PAINT. Still yellow on the A and the I, but the T was green. Did the vowels go together, or apart? The R for TRAIT was already gone. There was a logical way to work through this, if I chose to use the tools. I found a piece of scrap paper and mapped out the possibilities. A _ _ I T ... I _ A _ T ... _ _ A I T ... ADMIT or AWAIT? I played ADMIT, it came up green. I had to concede that the pencil work was worth the effort.

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