The Wordle Postgame Report is a brief analysis of a game of Wordle, the five-letter-word guessing game now owned by the New York Times. If you do not play Wordle, we encourage you to please skip this item. The existence of the Wordle Postgame Report does not constitute an endorsement of playing Wordle, not playing Wordle, or of the New York Times.
January 2, 2023, SKIRT, 4/6
TRYING OUT A less ordinary letter in the opener, with SHAVE, got the fairly ordinary result of a green S. STONY added a yellow T, while eliminating two more vowels. Something more consonant-heavy, then. SPURT? The RT ending was right, the P and U were not: there was only one vowel left, and not many consonants to combine the S with. SKIRT. I’d worked my way around the edge of the answer.
January 3, 2023, ANTIC, 4/6
IMAGINE A NICE, sleek, tubby WHALE—who could resist opening with it? It spouted up a yellow A. Rather than messing around with unbalanced consonant combinations fore or aft, I decided to move the A to the front of the word, with AVOID. The A turned green, and so did the I. Now it was, unfortunately, time to think about consonants. Everything that came to mind was fussy and obscure or archaic. AMBIT? ASTIR? Was it spelled APRIS or APRES? Either way, it wasn’t a fit Wordle answer. ASTIR was lousy but it had to be better than AMBIT. The T showed up green. What was left? ANTIC. A friskier answer than what I’d been trying.
January 4, 2023, LAYER, 3/6
GOING FOR A less-than-optimized opener, for the sake of variety or variance, I played LUMPY. It got a green L and, maybe even more usefully, a yellow Y. Where would the Y be if not at the end? I doubted LYCRA was an eligible word, and doubted even more strongly it would be an official Wordle answer. What if it went in the middle? LOYAL confirmed it did, and added a yellow A. That would make the front of the word LAY-, and the high-frequency letters were there to fill in the rest: LAYER. One piece of information on top of another.
January 5, 2023, SLEEK, 4/6
PRESENTED WITH AN opener of DEIGN, the game only saw fit to give me a yellow E. BRAKE kept the E yellow, adding a yellow K. The logical place for the K was the end, and FLECK confirmed that, with green L and E for good measure. Blank-L-E-blank-K. There couldn’t be a CL-, BL- or a GL- at the front; there couldn’t be an -RK or a -CK at the end. S was about the only blendable letter left. SLEEK? The logic of it fitted together smoothly and elegantly.
January 6, 2023, BELIE, 3/6
IN HONOR OF the January 6 participants, I played GUILT and got a yellow I and yellow L. Something made me want to pull them apart, rather than sliding them leftward together, so I tried CLAIM. The I was in the right spot, but the L was not. I thought about the word shape L-vowel-consonant-I-consonant. with no specific guesses coming into focus. It seemed I wasn’t going to get a feel for this one until I placed the L. BELIE wouldn’t make for a very efficient use of letters, but it would chip away at the structure problem. I played it as nothing more than a placeholder guess. The row of green said otherwise.
January 7, 2023, LEMON, 2/6
IT DIDN’T LOOK like much, at first, when I opened with HORDE and the two vowels came up yellow. Those results could point to almost anything—or could they? I thought of COVEN, but the O would be wrong, and DOZEN, but the O and the D would both be wrong. If a two-consonant blend pushed the O rightward, it would bump up against the E coming the other way. Like magnets with matching poles, they would bounce off each other and maybe swap places, fore and aft. EPOCH? No, the H again. DEPOT? No, the D again. LEMON? LEMON. The E would fit, the O would fit, the other letters… Green, green, green, green, green, straight across the second row. An aromatic, penetrating taste of success.
January 8, 2023, OPERA, 3/6
I’D NEVER OPENED with COBRA but I had used it as a second guess before, so I tried the wholly untouched CORAL instead. The whole middle of it, -ORA-, was yellow. The part of my brain that hadn’t woken up yet wanted to flip it around to make CAROL but the rest of my brain patiently explained to it what the gray squares on the C and L meant. AROMA would do a proper repositioning job, albeit with a repeating letter, and so would FAVOR. I liked AROMA better. It got a green A at the far end, and that reduced it to a simple sliding puzzle: if the O went here, the R had to go there, and if the R went here, the O had to go there. It was O _ _ R A or R _ _ O A, and one of those looked exactly like a word: OPERA. A soaring note of triumph.
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