When I first got into Wordle, I remember discussions about what is a good starting word, and I would usually opt for something like:
STARE
Then, when I discovered https://squabble.me (which implements a competitive Wordle with "battle royale" dynamics) I decided that spending time thinking of the optimal follow-up word was costing me too much HP, so I found a pair of starting words:
YOUTH ARISE
which gave me coverage of all the vowels (including Y) and some other common letters.
After gaining more experience with this setup, I looked at letter frequency charts, and used an anagram solver to find a trio of starting words:
THUMP SOLID CRANE
which was enough of an advantage that I was able to win a good percentage of Squabble games.
Today, though, I checked a replay of a game where I came second, and discovered that someone had taken this strat to the next level, since they were consistently starting with the four guesses:
DUCKY FORTH WINGS MAPLE
This seems riskier, as you only give yourself a single "spare" guess in which to try finding the locations of some of the letters you've already found, and I have often been in situations where I needed to brute force the final guess even if I have most of the letters in the right place, because a pattern like -ARN- (in green) didn't bring the word "varna" to mind, for example.
Anyway, I'll have to now try both that four word opening and this newly found five word opening:
CHUMP DRIFT GLOBE SNAKY LATER
and see which is quicker: finding the missing information myself with an extra guess (and brute forcing plausible looking words), or solving the word directly from the minimally required information available.
After gaining more experience with this setup, I looked at letter frequency charts, and used an anagram solver to find a trio of starting words:
which was enough of an advantage that I was able to win a good percentage of Squabble games.Today, though, I checked a replay of a game where I came second, and discovered that someone had taken this strat to the next level, since they were consistently starting with the four guesses:
This seems riskier, as you only give yourself a single "spare" guess in which to try finding the locations of some of the letters you've already found, and I have often been in situations where I needed to brute force the final guess even if I have most of the letters in the right place, because a pattern like -ARN- (in green) didn't bring the word "varna" to mind, for example.Anyway, I'll have to now try both that four word opening and this newly found five word opening:
and see which is quicker: finding the missing information myself with an extra guess (and brute forcing plausible looking words), or solving the word directly from the minimally required information available.