Wordles Who Live In Glass Houses

As I’ve mentioned previously (and which should surprise no one), I like word games, and so I play the daily Wordle. Everybody has their own approach and/or goals when it comes to Wordle, I’m sure; I just have two of them*:

• I play a different starting word every day, often something outlandish, like “xylem”, “junco”, or “vinca”; and
• The only thing I care about is how long of a streak I can keep going.

Now, some might suggest that playing whatever nutty starting word I think of and trying to keep a long streak going are somewhat in opposition. This is no doubt true, and in fact people have actually done analyses to determine the “best” starting words, but hey, I like a challenge. That’s why I play it on “hard mode”.**

Anyway, despite the fact that I don’t really care how long it takes me to solve any particular Wordle, I do like to look at the “Wordlebot” afterwards, so that it can criticize me for my choices, which it does freely. But sometimes there’s a bit of delicious irony, to wit, this Wordle from a few weeks back (no spoilers today!):

Really, Wordlebot? A skill rating of 0? No doubt you did it better, right?

Ah well. Better luck next time, Wordlebot. And you know what they say:

* I also have a few minor techniques, e.g., trying to eliminate vowels first and not duplicating letters until absolutely necessary, but those are more of guidelines than rules. In the example above, I did not follow my “don’t duplicate letters until absolutely necessary” rule and it paid off handsomely.
** Okay, you caught me. The actual reason I play it on hard mode is that hard mode requires you to reuse any previous letters that you found that are in the word somewhere, which I always want to do, but I used to occasionally—in the heat of the moment, or maybe just because it’s too early in the morning—forget that I found, say, a “Y”, and guess a word without a “Y” in it. Hard mode prevents me from doing that. So in a sense it’s actually “easy mode” (or at least “safe mode”), as far as I’m concerned.