CRANE first. If the A and E are not both present and there are no green consonants,
HOIST, else figure out a word that tests common di- or triglyphs (ch, cri) based on known letters that also contains O.
For the variants I've programmed, I've enforced that they start with a random word guessed (same random word for everyone though.)
Wordle is good as it is but personally I think most of the variants would be better off adopting this feature.
That said I saw someone speedrunning 10x Xordle games and for speedrunning they just ignore the starting word and make the same 4 guesses every time: CARVE SHIFT GODLY WHUMP
Wordle sparked off sort of a global game jam around variants, maybe because it was such a wholesome project. And these variants have found players; there's a lot of people who play a whole bunch of daily word games, there's some youtubers, etc.
I've programmed 3; the way that went down is I was curious if an idea I had would be fun (two Wordles on the same board, sort of a mix between Wordle and a word jumble since you don't know which word the clues go to.) Since there was an open source implementation this only took me one night, and it was in fact fun and started gaining some traction as https://xordle.xyz
Then some game designer friends suggested their own takes and I implemented those too: https://fibble.xyz lies to you once per row, and https://warmle.org tells you if you're close to the right letter rather than if a letter is in the wrong spot which gives the gameplay a very different feel
This is what I do, just use some word. Don't care so much about the score, just to get it within the allowed guesses. Would be boring to make a recipe.
An average of about 3.8 is not hard to achieve. Much harder is to reduce the number of failures, (i.e., requiring more than 6 guesses). At least in hard mode, that's true. I'm experimenting with easy mode now.
Easy mode is different. The goal is essentially to get as many 3s as possible while minimizing number of 5s. With any skill, actually losing will be almost impossible
Spoiler, stop reading if you started playing worldle in the past 3 months.
I used could a lot until it became one of my o my 2-guess wins. Now I hate using it knowing there is zero chance it’s the answer. I still do occasionally if someone after 3 guesses all 5 of those letters are available, which is almost never.
Since switching to hard mode, I almost never start with “good words”. Too much risk of getting the 10 possibilities with 3 guesses remaining type situation.
It’s true you can get into a hole, but there are strategies that help, like the one the person you’re replying to mentioned. It also helps to get a sense for what kinds of words wordle uses (e.g. no plurals). That being said, it’s the possibility of losing that makes it exciting!
I’ve played 113 times on hard mode and only lost once so far, guessing between two possibilities on the sixth word.
For a while now I’ve just been starting with the previous day’s word to mix things up, rather than trying to use the most optimal starters.
> In hard mode, Wordle can be solved in 3.5076 guesses on average (with 6 guesses at worst, i.e. 100% of the time). Or, with a different decision tree, it can be solved with a slightly worse average, but always within 5 guesses
The subset of words that are solutions is an internal data structure of the game. It is clearly cheating to refer to that list. If you are willing to examine the inside of the game's black box, the optimal strategy is to simply extract today's answer.
As a human, you already have knowledge which is similar to knowing the internal dictionary: you can judge what other kinds of words Wordle is likely to avoid (uncommon words, proper nouns, plurals). So I don't think it is cheating.
Thing is, you can develop a very strong intuition for which words are in that list: they're all common words and mostly "main dictionary entries" (you probably won't find a 4 letter noun or verb with "s" tacked onto the end, probably not "ed" or "es" either)
Certainly using the exact list is a step beyond that; but you can in fact get very accurate at guessing which words might be on it without memorizing the list
In the limit, if there was one day of Wordle left and you looked at what it was going to be and then told me that the optimal strategy of which words to guess is to just guess the solution as the first guess, that's cheating. Your "strategy" becomes a question of how well can you compress the list of solutions into the entropy allowed by how you chose to express your strategy, in this case "four 5-letter words" or somewhere between 20 and 94 bits of entropy[0].
[0] 4*5 assuming that 1 letter is one bit of entropy, which is a rule of thumb when you're compressing gigabytes of text to log2(26^(4*5)) if we just count the combinations of letters
"Cheating" is subjective, but you are correct. To put it in more neutral terms: Using the known 2309-word list of solutions, hard mode can be solved 100% of the time within 6 guesses. Not using it, you would need 7 guesses to guarantee that you solve it every time [1].
Sorry, can you explain what you mean here: I play hard mode and I always get the word within 6 guesses — and I’m no savant, I’m an idiot, and I don’t cheat — no looking at the word list. The same is true for my friends who play on hard mode: no cheating, always finish. Why is luck required for hard mode?
That's luck, which is fine. But there is not an optimal strategy which if followed always result in a win for the actual Wordle games. Some of them require at least 7 guesses in hard mode.
I lost this week on FOYER without repeated letters, there are plenty of words with ER endings and O as a second letter.
—-
VOICE
LONER
TOWER
JOKER
POSER
HOMER
——-
The last two were unlikely to be the word, but I try to finish in only a few minutes and those popped to my head before foyer. But I could have guessed BOXER or DOPER or some other words I’m sure. When I’ve lost it’s usually because I have 3 letters and guessing only 2 new letters at a time doesn’t let you eliminate the other options fast enough.
Our wordle slack group lots of people lost on foyer.
I had started with some random word with lots of consonants (all black result), so when I got to having just o e and r, I only had two clear possibilities I could see left with three guesses.
Wordle works with a 12k-word dictionary, which is very much comprehensive (that includes "words" like "grrrl"). However, the hidden/secret words are picked from a much smaller set of 2k reasonable words (i.e., frequent ones, and that most people would describe as English words).
There are two reasons that you always win within 6 guesses:
1. It has been shown [1] that in hard mode you can always solve wordle in 6 guesses (but not always in 5) if you assume that the hidden word is "reasonable", i.e., taken from the 2k-word list. However, if you know 12k 5-letter English words and if you don't assume that the hidden word is "reasonable", then you will sometimes need 7 guesses.
2. Even then, the average number of guesses that you need is much lower, at 3.5 guesses (or 4.5 using all 12k words). So if you play optimally or close to it, it is only in very rare cases (the worst case) that you will need the full 6 or 7 guesses.
So, surprisingly, the game is easier if you are not a "savant", or to be more precise, if you are not a computer :-).
Same. I start with QUARK every time. It’s mostly to one day achieve that elusive 1-guess solution but it often ends up making my life easier by avoiding pigeonholing myself on hard mode.
Originally I used BLACK, WHITE, SOUND, and tried to guess from there, occasionally throwing in GRUMP if the word wasn't obvious. I didn't like the repeated vowel, and knowing if there was a Y in the word would help, so I switched to:
AMUCK
FETID
SWORN
GLYPH
100% so far. One or two of those may have involved aggressively grepping /usr/share/dict/words, though.
I've used STEAL, ROUND for almost the entire ~80 games I've played, and I'm still 100% so far, no assistance or grepping. (Notably very close to the author's first two guesses he came up with without assistance)
I have a go-to third guess when needed, I just can't think of it right now.
I actually made a Wordle variant me and my family have been playing that prevents you using a word you have ever used before (unless it is that day's word). It's a really small tweak and it takes a while to have any impact, but it makes the game so much more interesting for me. (jezzamon.com/wordle if anyone wants to try it)
No idea if it'll become unplayable eventually but I'm having fun seeing it play out as more and more common words get locked out
My strategy is to never use the same start word, I like using a random word each time as that changes the path to solving. I might pick a random word from another open browser window, maybe from a news article or something like that. If I get stuck after the second or third try, I'll pick another random word, even if it contains a few discarded letters in order to ferret out 1 or 2 more valid letters.
For me, the best part of Wordle is not in finding the answer but in the steps prior as I work out the path to solving the correct answer.
I'm with you, I try and use a different word whilst keeping it plausibly common, it's part of the cerebral challenge. Using an algorithmic approach is efficient but not "fun". Target is always 3.
Another vote for this strategy to keep the game interesting.
Putting the same words in at the start got boring after the third game, and the first word dictates the on-the-fly logic to select the next, and so on.
It all comes down to how you want to play. Using maths optimises "winning", but not using maths challenges ones situational intellect. I prefer the latter.
This is what I've done from the start. Always pick a random word as the first entry (or I guess "random" since I'm still ensuring that there's no duplicate letters). It helps keep the game from getting stale.
There are 28 letters. With 3 initial same words you can cover up to 53.5% of the alphabet. With 4 initial same words you can cover up to 71.4%. There are only 5 vowels A, E, I, O and U which can be covered with the first two words. You can even add Y in the first two words played.
I always start, very ego-centrically, with my last name (matching my HN account name), and then usually follow up with BEADS and JUICY to cover all the vowels.
But I'll try guess the target word if the first or first two words give me >= 3 hits.
Then I'll spend WAY more time trying to solve the 5 daily chess puzzles at https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rated ...
I thought it was in that linked video or somewhere that I found a list of starting words to try to make it easier to solve it based on letter frequency and getting a few vowels in within the scope of the Wordle word list (not a dictionary list).
These are the words I use:
SOARE
TREAD (or TRADE, which is an anagram)
ADIEU
By default my game play is like “hard mode” (only use letters already found to be correct and avoid letters found to be incorrect). That helps most of the time.
One of the annoying (or challenging) things about Wordle is that its word list has many sets of words that differ by just one letter. For example, you may get _ATCH right and then have to really guess if it’s going to be CATCH or BATCH or PATCH or MATCH or WATCH or LATCH or HATCH (maybe there are more words with a different first letter in this range). I’ve seen several sets of words like this. Just can’t do this within six total guesses. So chance does matter.
I thought this too at first, but this is where the real strategy comes out, because you can guess MULCH and that will tell you if it's LATCH or MATCH. or CLIMB, that would also eliminate BATCH. There's intelligent ways to guess to eliminate more letters. Hard mode is only hard because it eliminates this possibility of constraint narrowing.
I think Hard Mode is not a good name for it. The game is already plenty hard.
My wife and I don't care about the end result in those situations since the fun has been removed at that point. We just iterate through until we're right or have run through our chances.
For octordle I like CORNY and ADIEU for my first two guesses. Gets all the vowels and enough to start. For wordle, starting from STERN or a few other words like that is fine.
Josh Wardle is a cultural icon. He's really done an amazing thing.
STARE DOING CHUMP is usually enough for me to have a good stab at Quordle. For regular Wordle I try to stick to "hard mode", with the constraint that discovered letters have to be used.
I've also been playin on hard mode almost since the beginning. While it usually does make the game more interesting, it also annoyingly often makes your win depend on pure luck. Ironically this happens more often when your first guesses were very good.
Imagine having SHA?E confirmed and now being forced to stupidly guess between SHAPE, SHAKE, SHARE, SHAME, SHAVE or SHADE instead of eliminating half of those possibilities with a single word.
So maybe this implementation of a hard mode isn't well suited anyway if you're looking for a bigger challenge in skill.
I found that only happens if you try to hit the most common letters in your first guesses. If you use middle of the road letters you tend to get only a couple while eliminating a lot - s and e would be bad early letters because they don’t reduce enough words
I have settled on DREAM PILOT (I often don't use pilot if I get 2 or more yellow/green) with no reason other than I'm pig headed and refuse strategies others suggest.
I hadn't seen anyone else use that pair when I suggested it in early Jan https://twitter.com/bazzargh/status/1477998502747779079 ... but I guess there aren't many choices with those letters and other people were bound to hit on those words! Seems quite popular now.
For octordle/sedecordle I found that the 2 standard guesses wasn't enough to stop getting stuck, particularly it's missing Y for words that use that as a vowel. For those puzzles, I use INPUT SHAME GLORY, but I've not attempted to check if this is anything like optimal - I very rarely fail those puzzles with these 3 tho.
I don't regularly play octordle but came to the conclusion that you really want at least 3 start words. Otherwise, you start trying to solve with guesses that aren't globally optimum and run out of guesses.
Opinions vary based on the input text, but the English letter frequency list I use starts ETAONRISH in descending frequency.
Based on that, coupled with a little bit of insight on English words (as opposed to random collections of 5 letters) I've ended up with ALIEN, STORM, CHUMP as my regular first 3. Sometimes I deviate if the earlier rows offer insight, and sometimes I swap the first 2 based on a whim.
And unless it is obviously worth a try, I use my first 3 words to eliminate letters and not to guess.
I usually get it in 4, sometimes in 5, almost never needing 6, and have failed once. So not necessarily the best, but good enough.
Using the "same words every time" (i.e., a fixed set of initial guesses) has been studied before [1,2,3]. It is one of the few remaining open questions about Wordle. Interestingly, it can be done in 6+1 guesses [4] (COMBO FATTY GRRRL SPUDS VENGE WHILK, then the possibilities are always narrowed down to a singleton). However, it is unknown whether it is possible within 5+1 guesses, which would make Wordle 100% solvable even with such a constrained approach!
It is unfortunate that 3Blue1Brown's excellent video has been so often misquoted as providing "optimal" guesses for Wordle. Of course, one can legitimately argue that using maths takes the fun out of the game... but if we *are* going to use maths, then the information entropy approach is simply not the one most suited to this specific game (because the dictionary is fully known).
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadMight
Plows
—-
95% success rate.
Wordle is good as it is but personally I think most of the variants would be better off adopting this feature.
That said I saw someone speedrunning 10x Xordle games and for speedrunning they just ignore the starting word and make the same 4 guesses every time: CARVE SHIFT GODLY WHUMP
Why?
I've programmed 3; the way that went down is I was curious if an idea I had would be fun (two Wordles on the same board, sort of a mix between Wordle and a word jumble since you don't know which word the clues go to.) Since there was an open source implementation this only took me one night, and it was in fact fun and started gaining some traction as https://xordle.xyz
Then some game designer friends suggested their own takes and I implemented those too: https://fibble.xyz lies to you once per row, and https://warmle.org tells you if you're close to the right letter rather than if a letter is in the wrong spot which gives the gameplay a very different feel
Pulis
Chynd
This does more than half of the alphabet for the most frequently used letters.
https://slc.is/posts/bestwordlestrategy.html
PIOUS
Hits all the vowels except Y. But I feel like it's not so great. Wish I could replace the P with something more useful.
I used could a lot until it became one of my o my 2-guess wins. Now I hate using it knowing there is zero chance it’s the answer. I still do occasionally if someone after 3 guesses all 5 of those letters are available, which is almost never.
I think it's bad strategy, but might help meet your goals, because D is pretty good.
STROY
All the vowels and the three most common consonants in two words.
PIOUS
I also want to hit all vowels ASAP, and I'm also dissatisfied with that P.
salet, cramp
I’ve played 113 times on hard mode and only lost once so far, guessing between two possibilities on the sixth word.
For a while now I’ve just been starting with the previous day’s word to mix things up, rather than trying to use the most optimal starters.
> In hard mode, Wordle can be solved in 3.5076 guesses on average (with 6 guesses at worst, i.e. 100% of the time). Or, with a different decision tree, it can be solved with a slightly worse average, but always within 5 guesses
Certainly using the exact list is a step beyond that; but you can in fact get very accurate at guessing which words might be on it without memorizing the list
[0] 4*5 assuming that 1 letter is one bit of entropy, which is a rule of thumb when you're compressing gigabytes of text to log2(26^(4*5)) if we just count the combinations of letters
[1] http://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best_...
The last two were unlikely to be the word, but I try to finish in only a few minutes and those popped to my head before foyer. But I could have guessed BOXER or DOPER or some other words I’m sure. When I’ve lost it’s usually because I have 3 letters and guessing only 2 new letters at a time doesn’t let you eliminate the other options fast enough.
Our wordle slack group lots of people lost on foyer.
I had started with some random word with lots of consonants (all black result), so when I got to having just o e and r, I only had two clear possibilities I could see left with three guesses.
There are two reasons that you always win within 6 guesses:
1. It has been shown [1] that in hard mode you can always solve wordle in 6 guesses (but not always in 5) if you assume that the hidden word is "reasonable", i.e., taken from the 2k-word list. However, if you know 12k 5-letter English words and if you don't assume that the hidden word is "reasonable", then you will sometimes need 7 guesses.
2. Even then, the average number of guesses that you need is much lower, at 3.5 guesses (or 4.5 using all 12k words). So if you play optimally or close to it, it is only in very rare cases (the worst case) that you will need the full 6 or 7 guesses.
So, surprisingly, the game is easier if you are not a "savant", or to be more precise, if you are not a computer :-).
[1] http://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best_...
STARE BLIND CHUMP
AMUCK FETID SWORN GLYPH
100% so far. One or two of those may have involved aggressively grepping /usr/share/dict/words, though.
I have a go-to third guess when needed, I just can't think of it right now.
PORTS (or FORTY if ADIEU doesn't match anything)
I just want all the vowels.
No idea if it'll become unplayable eventually but I'm having fun seeing it play out as more and more common words get locked out
For me, the best part of Wordle is not in finding the answer but in the steps prior as I work out the path to solving the correct answer.
Putting the same words in at the start got boring after the third game, and the first word dictates the on-the-fly logic to select the next, and so on.
It all comes down to how you want to play. Using maths optimises "winning", but not using maths challenges ones situational intellect. I prefer the latter.
These are the words I use:
SOARE
TREAD (or TRADE, which is an anagram)
ADIEU
By default my game play is like “hard mode” (only use letters already found to be correct and avoid letters found to be incorrect). That helps most of the time.
One of the annoying (or challenging) things about Wordle is that its word list has many sets of words that differ by just one letter. For example, you may get _ATCH right and then have to really guess if it’s going to be CATCH or BATCH or PATCH or MATCH or WATCH or LATCH or HATCH (maybe there are more words with a different first letter in this range). I’ve seen several sets of words like this. Just can’t do this within six total guesses. So chance does matter.
I think Hard Mode is not a good name for it. The game is already plenty hard.
On to the next game!
Josh Wardle is a cultural icon. He's really done an amazing thing.
Those are the 10 most common letters in 5-letter words. Even if I get good hits with SNAIL, I enter ROUTE.
Imagine having SHA?E confirmed and now being forced to stupidly guess between SHAPE, SHAKE, SHARE, SHAME, SHAVE or SHADE instead of eliminating half of those possibilities with a single word.
So maybe this implementation of a hard mode isn't well suited anyway if you're looking for a bigger challenge in skill.
For octordle/sedecordle I found that the 2 standard guesses wasn't enough to stop getting stuck, particularly it's missing Y for words that use that as a vowel. For those puzzles, I use INPUT SHAME GLORY, but I've not attempted to check if this is anything like optimal - I very rarely fail those puzzles with these 3 tho.
Based on that, coupled with a little bit of insight on English words (as opposed to random collections of 5 letters) I've ended up with ALIEN, STORM, CHUMP as my regular first 3. Sometimes I deviate if the earlier rows offer insight, and sometimes I swap the first 2 based on a whim.
And unless it is obviously worth a try, I use my first 3 words to eliminate letters and not to guess.
I usually get it in 4, sometimes in 5, almost never needing 6, and have failed once. So not necessarily the best, but good enough.
Guess all the vowels early. TRADE and PIOUS is how I usually do it, but ALIEN may be a better starter.
It is unfortunate that 3Blue1Brown's excellent video has been so often misquoted as providing "optimal" guesses for Wordle. Of course, one can legitimately argue that using maths takes the fun out of the game... but if we *are* going to use maths, then the information entropy approach is simply not the one most suited to this specific game (because the dictionary is fully known).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30094398
[2] https://www.poirrier.ca/notes/wordle-optimal/#fixed-guesses
[3] https://github.com/alexandres/magicwordschallenge
[4] https://github.com/alexandres/magicwordschallenge/issues/2