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Wordle Postgame Report, Weekend CATCH up: July 7-9

GAMES OF SKILL AND CHANCE DEP'T.

Tom Scocca

10 Jul 2022 — 2 min read

Tony Awards - 21st April 1974: L-R: Canadian-born actors Christopher Plummer and Colleen Dewhurst (1924-1991), with her mouth AGAPE, and American actor Michael Moriarty pose on stage with their Tony Awards, New York City. Plummer won the award for Best Actor in a Musical for 'Cyrano,' Dewhurst won Best Actress for 'A Moon for the Misbegotten' and Moriarty won Best Actor for 'Find Your Way Home.' (Photo by Tim Boxer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The Wordle Postgame Report is a brief analysis of at 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 7, AGAPE, 4/6

LIVE BY HIGHER variance, die by higher variance. CLOUT as an opener got nothing. PRIME got a yellow P and a green E, maybe the most unhelpful of all letter placements. Move the P, keep using common letters: SPADE. Both vowels were green, but the P was still yellow—the ending had to be -APE. But what could the first two letters be? S, C, R, T, and L were all gone, which took away most consonant combinations. No GRAPE, no DRAPE, no SHAPE. H was still unused, but there was nothing to put it with: BHAPE? No, one of the letters had to be a vowel, recycled from the -APE. EWAPE...AGAPE. The answer had opened up.

July 8, VOICE, 3/6

CLEAN AND DIRECT. SLAKE was an unproductive-looking starter, yielding only the green E at the end, but then DRIVE added a green I and a yellow V. The latter effectively wrapped things up. Was Wordle going to use OVINE as an answer? Clearly not. V _ I _ E was the way to go, and that was VOICE. Mainstream, correct, over.

July 9, STEAD 4/6

A LOUSY WORD, built for joyless and uninteresting play. MOIST got a yellow S and T; STARE turned the S and T green and added a yellow A and E. So it would be STEA-something. STEAL? No. It couldn't be STEAM, because M was already gone. What was left? STEAD, barely a word—a wordlike vestigial object that can only survive in the controlled habitat of stock phrases. And that was the official answer, in four. Only after I saw other people had built longer chutes did I realize STEAK had still been there, and had been an unquestionably superior choice. If I'd played better, I would have needed five rounds.

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