Wordle Postgame Report, December 5

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, Indignity encourages 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.

December 5, WOKEN, 6/6

SOMEHOW THE SEARCH function told me I had never played CRANE before, so I did. The N and E were yellow, but I couldn't make my brain drag them away from the end of the word. It was so hard to see other possibilities, I went ahead and doubled up on the E with NEEDY. There was no second E; also the N and E were still yellow. I still couldn't see where this could go, and I bumbled into an even worse play: STEIN, which I knew had already been a Wordle answer, and for which I forgot all about the gray E I'd just gotten in the third position. So the E stayed yellow, on a wasted guess, but at least the N turned green. Maybe now I could come up with a reasonable and methodical word. WOMEN? All green except the M. Fine, not WOMEN, but WOVEN. All green except the V. The only letter left it could possibly be was K, which I'd rejected before for making too lousy of an answer. WOKEN. An ungainly verb tense of a politically skunked word. I'd played terribly but Wordle had played worse. Not worth getting out of bed for.

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