Wordle

 

Photo courtesy of cnn.com

Have you played Wordle yet?  Apparently I am the last member of my family to discover it.  It has its charms.

The photo above the break illustrates how to play Wordle (the photo appears to be a live video, but it's really not, so don't click on the arrow; it's a still screenshot of a video).  The object of the game is to guess a five letter word.  There are no clues or hints.  The player is presented with five blanks, and a keyboard array with all the letters of the alphabet.  You get six tries to guess what the five letter word is.

As you can see, the player in the photo started by guessing "WATER".  Not a bad first guess: A,T, E and R are among the more commonly used letters in English.  If the letters you've guessed aren't in the solution (W, T and E in the photo above), they appear as grey on a dark background, and they're also greyed out on the keyboard below.  Letters which are in the solution but are in the wrong position appear with a golden background (A and R in the photo above).  Letters which are in the solution and are in the correct position appear with a green background.  So after one guess, the player knew that the solution contained the letters A and R, and also knew that A isn't in the second position, while R isn't in the fifth position.  So the possibilities are narrowed down a little bit.  After the fourth guess,the player knew that the word started with "CRA", and thanks to previous wrong guesses, also knew a bunch of letters which aren't in the word, and so the puzzle was solved on the next guess.

The game only accepts actual English words as guesses; so you can't start by typing, for example, "AEIOU" or "ETOAS".  I am an old crossword hand, and I had originally thought that, once I had a couple of letters in the right position, it would be a cinch to solve the puzzle - but it isn't.  For one thing, unlike a crossword, there are no clues to help the thinking process.  For another, Wordle only accepts actual words as guesses.  Suppose you know I is the third letter and T is somewhere in the word but not the first position.   Furthermore, you know that A, E, S and R are not in the word.  Go ahead and construct a five letter word which observes those requirements.  It takes a little thought.    

I am not certain the player in the photo knows what s/he is doing (but s/he might; I'm still very much a rookie, so that player may be using some strategy which hasn't dawned on me yet.)  His/her second guess is "LAIRS", which strikes me as kind of a wasted guess, as it keeps "A" in the 2nd position - but we already know A isn't in the second position, because that was already determined in the first guess.

I have been trying "ADIEU" as my first guess, as it utilizes four vowels.  (Of course, "adieu" is French, but the game accepts it).  It gives me a pretty good, if not perfect, idea of which vowels the word has.  But my daughters, who are more seasoned players than me, tell me "adieu" is not really such a clever guess.  One of them uses "TEARS" as her first guess; every letter in "TEARS" is among the most commonly used letters in English.  But my current line of thought, for what it's worth, is that five letters are not enough for the laws of average letter usage to apply very strongly.  The solution on one recent day was "POINT"; "TEARS" would have helped only a little (in fairness, one could say the same about "ADIEU").

What induced me to start playing it is that every morning around mid-morning, the other members of my family start texting the family group chat about how many guesses it took them to solve the puzzle. The best I've done so far is three attempts.  My average is about four attempts.  Others in my family have solved it in two a few times.  

Wordle was in the news this past week because the NY Times bought it from its creator, Josh Wardle (Wardle/Wordle, get it?), for a price described as "in the low seven figures".  Good for him for possibly getting paid enough to retire on.  As for the newspaper, one can only assume that its marketing deep thinkers have concluded that the kind of people who enjoy playing Wordle are the kind of people who enjoy reading the NY Times.  And even if Wordle players don't actually read newspapers (my children don't, my younger siblings don't; one fears newspapers are facing a bleak future), the NY Times' owning the game means that the owners will reap all the rewards from ad exposures, click-throughs, cookies and whatever other magical, pernicious electronic mites burrow into our devices and lives to tell the marketers more about us than we know about ourselves.  Indeed, according to Reuters, capturing visitors who don't read newspapers seems to be part of the NY Times' owners' strategy:

As the Times also seeks to grow paid readers outside its core news content, games and puzzles have become a key part of a strategy to keep its audience engaged on its apps and websites.

Its Games unit, which has more than one million subscriptions, started with the Daily Crossword, and later launched games such as Spelling Bee, Tiles, Letter Boxed and Vertex.

Wordle appeals to reasonably bright, busy people because it doesn't take very long to play, and it is challenging without being impossible.  Crossword connoisseurs know that the puzzle needs to be calibrated just right; too difficult and it gets frustrating; too easy and it gets boring.

If you haven't tried Wordle, I highly recommend it.  It's free (for now; Wordle fans are freaking out about the NY Times purchase, because much NY Times content ends up behind a subscriber wall, but the company has promised to keep it free - for now).  To play Wordle, just go to this URL:

https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/