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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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can always win even in hard mode with perfect play: https://www.poirrier.ca/notes/wordle-optimal/ > 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
Only if you cheat by referring to the list of solution words. No strategy with a 6-guess worst case is possible without referring to that list.
[1] http://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best_...
Obviously anyone can play however they like and how they enjoy the game. But I feel like this "enter three optimized words and win" is too easy. So instead I go with hard mode, and have to think some more. I still start with the same word every time, but from there on most parts vary. I also allow myself to fall back to normal mode if finding the word depends on pure luck (e.g. _ATCH). Bonus: If you and your friends…
My histogram is mostly 4's, with 2 losses in around 100 games, so I think I'm doing something right.
REACT 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.
PIOUS
I also want to hit all vowels ASAP, and I'm also dissatisfied with that P.
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I play in Hard Mode, so that type of method rarely works
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 possibili…
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 bes…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There isn’t a hard mode strategy that assures a win, though. You have to get lucky or lose sometimes.
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?
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_...
thank
fuels
crowd
gimpy
But I don't think it is a good idea for the average person to have too many set words. Unless you have great knowledge of the dictionary of legal words you might need extra clues to word order etc. ie I recently got a game with a letter repeated 3 times.
I've settled on the following word list to determine if 20 of 26 characters are present within 4 guesses: thank fuels crowd gimpy If there are fewer than 5 letters present, "bevvy" will eliminate another two ('b' and 'v'), leaving j, q, x, and z as the remaining possible characters. These occur rarely (though "pizza", "bijou", and "vixen" can be challenging targets. More usually, it's words with either doubled charac…
On Octordle, 4 words seem easiest although it makes the game more of an anagram solving exercise and in my limited experience didn't give me much of a consistent score advantage vs. three.