For those late to the party, Wordle is a word-guessing game entailing 30 empty squares stacked into one big box, six rows of five squares, each row a virtual life in your bid to unveil the day’s mystery word.
Think hangman meets Mastermind, that 1970s parlour game where players waged war on a cribbage-like board. Using colours instead of letters, Mastermind relied on pegs to indicate how closely your opponent’s stabs matched the colour sequence you were hiding.
Wordle has become a global sensation and was recently purchased by The New York Times for a seven-figure sum.
Wordle does likewise – but online and in vogue. Catchier still, the free software dishes up a new term every 24 hours, meaning every player around the world is seeking to unveil the same mystery solution.
HEART was my first guess, playing my maiden Wordle after Boxing Day. The phone screen blinked. Two green squares tinted my guess, telling me I had two correct letters in the right position: E and R. As for HAT, the remnant letters of HEART, they triggered grey squares, denoting their absence from the eventual answer.
What would your next guess be? WEIRD maybe. Would NEURO be kosher? NEHRU is surely a no-no. So runs the daily litany among countless Wordlers, innocent people hooked by this cute fetish.
Tips from an expert
- The best first guess has five different letters including three vowels. Try IRATE or TINEA, ORATE or RADIO.
- Lock down any green square – right letter, right place – as your anchor point for future guesses, testing any gold squares in fresh combinations.
- Banish the grey letters – as shaded on the keyboard – even if tempted to use them to escort any untried letters. You’ll never chance on the solution that way.
- Don’t discount doubles, as the FERRY furore showed. Usually isograms (words with unique letters) are the solutions, but beware the YUKKY IGLOO.
Josh Wardle, a Reddit engineer, launched the gimmick in October. (It’s since been purchased by The New York Times for an undisclosed sum, said to be in the low-seven figures.) The premise was simple: six potential guesses to unmask one five-letter word. A green square says right letter in the right place. Gold means a right letter in the wrong place, while grey tells you what letters to ignore.
A century ago, the equivalent was Bulls and Cows. Jane Austen probably dabbled in the game, for want of Netflix or Candy Crush. Let’s imagine Jane’s mystery word was GHOST, while my gambit was STOCK. Weird as it sounds, Jane might reply, “Two cows, one bull.” This translates as two correct letters in the wrong spots (S and T here), while my bullseye O would qualify as a bull – right letter, right spot.
Wordle is a picnic in comparison, confirming which specific letters are correctly parked, or at least relevant to the solution. With HEART, I knew my HAT was redundant. So, I plumped for MERRY as guess Number 2, which was controversial.
Late to the party? Here’s how to solve everyone’s favourite word game
Source: Philippines Alive
