Probably most people who are in the habit of attempting the game, Wordle, once a day, just use their phones. I've found that I can't concentrate on finding the word within 6 tries by looking at the QWERTY keyboard displayed on the screen. I use a pen and paper, preferably one of my favorite BIC 4-color pens and a spiral notebook. It's probably seen by others as a little obsessive, but I enjoy writing down the 5 lines for blank spaces where the correct word will end up, and then quickly inscribing the alphabet in a fairly neat column. My husband Doug and I decided not to compete with each other on two phones, but rather to do it together, each with our own pen and paper. He'll do his figuring on any scrap of paper he can find, or on an old envelope. Every time we enter a guess, we have a silly habit that I do a drum roll with my tongue, and he taps his pen on the table, (somewhat irritating to me at times, since occasionally he starts his drum roll before I've even brought the game up on my phone!)
One time recently he said, "I don't have anything to write on. I'll just share your paper." That's when I realized how OCDish I had become about my own space. He started writing words we were going to try in the 5 spaces I had reserved for the final answer, and then CROSSING off the letters that didn't work....in MY SPACE! He also didn't have his own pen, and I had to wait my turn to use it.
Shocked to see what was happening, I said, "What are you doing??"
"It's just my way of figuring", he said.
I tried to be more sharing, starting to make a new set of 5 spaces for my own figuring. "Could you please keep away from my alphabet though? I have my own little system where I cross off the letters that are wrong, and put checks next to the ones that show up yellow, and are somewhere else in the word, see? And then I like to put a little square around the letter that's in the right place." "Hmm," he said. finding that after our first guessed word, the 4th letter, O showed up green, and therefore in the correct spot, I placed it there and put a square around it. He kept marking up my original spot, but seemed to get it that that my new area was now reserved only for me.
We continued to brainstorm, mentioning possible words, and sometimes catching each other in a mistake, like, "How about canoe?" "Nope, there is no N", or "The E can be anywhere but the end." "Darn!", I say, but happy to have missed a close call, and not wasting a turn. Two brains ARE better than one.
The Wordle people are rather kind if a word is misspelled and not on their word list. For example, for some reason, I have it in my head to spell "bagel" wrong. I put in "bagle", and the letters wiggled on the screen, and said "not on word list", not penalizing us nor counting it as one of our guesses.
When we first started playing, Doug said, "There must be certain consonants that are in most words.", so he diligently looked up on Google what they recommended. "S, T, R, and N are the most common, so what do you think of starting with store or story as our first word? Yesterday's word ended in E, so maybe we should start with story, since it ends in y."
He always tries to bring logic into the game and tries to strategize. He realized that past words have most often been nouns. In the last few games, we feel that the maker of the puzzle at the New York Times, is messing with us and giving us the most obscure 5-letter words, leading us to choose the most uncommon one we can think of, or making us take a chance on repeating an already used letter. "Robot" was the word that introduced us to the fact that we could re-use a letter in another spot.
We were trying to up our game, since at first we thought we were beating the system by starting with "adieu" or "adios" as our first try, thinking that we should try out a lot of vowels first. Then we realized that very few words end in U, and we have yet to see a plural word, so both of those words are a waste of a perfectly good try. Can't have that.
A few months ago, I traveled to Washington DC to visit my daughter and new grandchild. Doug and I worried how we were going to keep up our streak of about 98 Wordles straight without losing when we were apart. I told him I didn't want to take the chance of breaking our winning streak by doing it on my own. We finally decided to talk on speaker phone together each day, discussing each word.
One evening I called Doug and we both had our pen and paper ready. I had him on speaker, as we discussed each word possibility . On the 5th try, we had E, O, and Y in their correct (green) spots. Jennie had been overhearing us making suggestions and we both agreed that "epoxy" would work. "But it can't be that," Doug worried, "It's a brand name!" It was a chance to take, but we took it, and thankfully, on the sixth try, it was right. My daughter said it was so hard for her to hear our conversations about it, since she had already done the game for the day. She was thinking, "Yes! It's a word! Go for it!" but all Wordlers are sworn to secrecy, so she painfully kept her mouth shut.
Then, I said, "I'll have to report into Lucas and Jen, (my son and daughter-in-law), to let them know how we did. We do this every day."
"What?", she exclaimed. "I want to be in on that too!" Sooner or later, we had her husband chiming in as well, all competing together. For me it's made the world seem a little smaller, since I'm in California and my kids are in New York and DC. Now our little group uses the text also to share photos of everything going on in our lives.
Actually, after quite a lot of time, Doug and I are the main devotees to Wordle. We're retired, and they aren't, and we all think that the words are getting harder. I mean, tryst? midge? aphid? Really.
If you've gotten this far in my story, it's probably because you like the game too. We've talked to friends about strategies, and some are as enthusiastic as we are, while I watch others' eyes glaze over at the thought of Wordle. We however, still make time in our day to try our hand at it, even though today we got frustrated and finally lost. All of our logic flew out the window, as we tried all the most obscure words first, finally losing to what we thought would be the most common one, "power"!
