Wordle Postgame Report Holiday Weekend CATCH-Up, January 13–16, 2023

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, of not playing Wordle, or of the New York Times.

January 13, 2023, HUMAN, 4/6

RELOADING THE WORDLE tab to start the day brought up a string of white boxes reading E R R O R. I tried again in a little while and the regular grid came back. It took me four or five attempts to think of a word that I'd never started with, and that Wordle had never ended with, before I finally landed ion TIPSY and was rewarded with a row of pure gray. WREAK found a green A and nothing else. With nine letters in the trash already, I should have been getting somewhere, but I wasn't. I thought about CANAL but couldn't bring myself to repeat a letter with so much gray on the board. FOCAL had more possibilities; even so, all it yielded was the green A again. Thirteen letters gone, including every vowel but U and a repeat A, and where was I? What would the A go with to end the word: -AM? Or -AG? Or -AD? Then I thought of -AN and the rest of the word filled itself in. There still was an H, there still was the U, and the M...HUMAN. Fallable and mortal, but not dead yet.

January 14, 2023, KOALA, 3/6

I GOT AN irritatingly uninformative-looking start from playing CHAFE, with a centered green A. As usual with a lone vowel in the middle, I couldn't even tell how many syllables I was aiming for. I guessed one, and tried SPARK. The K was...yellow. Here was something potentially illuminating. Now the K had to go somewhere sort of weird, and without a C, R, or S for company. Was it next to the end, as some word ending in -AKY? It certainly couldn't be SHAKY. Or was it in one of the other two spots, making K _ A _ _ or _ K A _ _? If something was between the K and the A, what would it be? The missing E ruled out KNAVE. An O, though: KOALA. I didn't mind trying the repeated letter; what else could it be? Green all across. Cute little answer, just exotic enough to be appealing.

January 15, 2023, SPIRE, 4/6

STARTING OFF BY playing a U, in PUNCH, was a big swing and turned out to be mostly a miss. Only the P was yellow. I moved toward more common letters with STAMP and got a green S, with the P still yellow. Even more common letters: SPARE. Green everywhere but the A. SPIRE. An upside-down tapering point of gray pointed to the solution.

January 16, 2023, FROCK, X/6

I OPENED THE game by playing WRONG and kept on playing wrong. How hard could the answer be, with a green -RO- on the board already? Maybe it was FROZE but why play a verb tense and a rare letter, with so much board to go? How about PROSE? Nope, same green -RO-. OK, nothing ending with E, how about TROUT? Not TROUT. The double green stripe was growing long enough to worry about a little. Maybe the O had a second O with it, as in DROOL? Not DROOL. Four rows gone. Now would be the time a smart player hit the brakes and tried playing as many unused letters as possible. But what if the answer were AROMA? It was not AROMA. One row left—what could go with the R? BR-? CR-? I thought of BROOK and CROOK, forgot I'd already eliminated the second O, and played BROOK, doomed before I hit "return." The answer was FROCK. Dumb word. I was sort of glad I hadn't focused enough to find it, but the whole thing was pure incompetence. My mind was elsewhere. I felt like I'd lost my office as a Wordle player.

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