Wordle Wonderland

Everything I know about Wordle, which is nothing, I learned by playing Wordle, a word game that seemed to spring up overnight, though by now it commands the attention, albeit briefly, of millions every day. The challenge it presents is to guess a five-letter word simply by selecting five letters.

You have six tries.  If a letter in the word you choose  is somewhere in the mystery word, its background will change to orange, unless that letter is also in the correct position, in which case the background will become green. Once you have chosen your suite of letters and hit the "enter" button, the letters seem to flip open like the squares in old-fashioned  TV game shows. And the thrill of watching the tiles flip, one after the other—gray, gray, orange, gray, green—is considerable. But the sensation when  the word you enter flips green, green, green, green, green must resemble that of a game-show contestant who has just won a trip to Hawaii.

Among Wordle's many attractive features is the fact that the meaning of words has no part to play in it. Some experts no doubt calculate word combinations and frequencies, but I love the freedom of choosing any word that strikes my fancy as a starter.

If it's a lovely morning, I might enter the word PEACH. If I got up on the wrong side of the bed, my opening word might be GRUNT. There are times when I tempt fate by beginning with an unusual word like EPOCH or FRACK. I go through phases where I emphasize the vowels—ALIEN—and others during which I play it safe, as it were, with ho-hum words like CRANE or MEANT. For a while I had a working rule of excluding S and T from my opening guess. I believe the letter H is the key to the entire business. But I have no idea how that could be. Or why.

Another attractive feature of the game is the fact that you can play it only once a day. And it only takes a few minutes to complete, unless you find yourself in a position where several boxes are green, many letters have been eliminated, and you're sure the answer lies within your grasp. In that case, you could spend twenty minutes on a single guess.

If you happen to get the word in three guesses the rest of the day goes well. It you get it in two, which is always pure luck, you pass the hours enveloped in an unseen transcendent glow. If you drag out the procedure to five or (shudder) even six guesses, gray clouds appear on the horizon.

Well, there's always tomorrow.

A third attractive feature is the fact that your previous effort vanishes forever the day after you submit it. I find it difficult to remember what today's word was a few minutes after I've discovered it, perhaps because the word's meaning has nothing to do with its correctness. But I tend to remember how many tries it took me to get there.

So far I've played Wordle 229 times (they provide you with the statistics automatically ) and have failed to guess the word within the allotted six tries only three times. Is that good or bad? How would I know?

The words I've failed to guess in the six allotted rows have all be easy words, but very similar to many other easy words: LOVER, COVER, HOVER, MOVER, ROVER.  Sheer luck if you get such a word in four or five guesses. On the other hand, a few weeks ago I got the Wordle in two, and the Wordle Bot told me I'd picked the correct answer from 507 remaining possibilities. A true shot in the dark.

What was the word? STEIN.

Then just the other day, I got the correct word in two again. This time it was my first guess that was lucky: SALTY. Only the first and last letters were wrong, and the second guess came easy: WALTZ.

According to the bot, which I sometimes take a look at after I've solved the puzzle, that was the only possible guess left.

The bot has no genuine heuristic advice to offer, but it has access to lots of statistics, and it can tell you what the average score for that day's round has been.