[AnonC]

I thought it was in that linked video or somewhere that I found a list of starting words to try to make it easier to solve it based on letter frequency and getting a few vowels in within the scope of the Wordle word list (not a dictionary list).

These are the words I use:

SOARE

TREAD (or TRADE, which is an anagram)

ADIEU

By default my game play is like “hard mode” (only use letters already found to be correct and avoid letters found to be incorrect). That helps most of the time.

One of the annoying (or challenging) things about Wordle is that its word list has many sets of words that differ by just one letter. For example, you may get _ATCH right and then have to really guess if it’s going to be CATCH or BATCH or PATCH or MATCH or WATCH or LATCH or HATCH (maybe there are more words with a different first letter in this range). I’ve seen several sets of words like this. Just can’t do this within six total guesses. So chance does matter.

[adenozine]

I thought this too at first, but this is where the real strategy comes out, because you can guess MULCH and that will tell you if it's LATCH or MATCH. or CLIMB, that would also eliminate BATCH. There's intelligent ways to guess to eliminate more letters. Hard mode is only hard because it eliminates this possibility of constraint narrowing.

I think Hard Mode is not a good name for it. The game is already plenty hard.

[frosted-flakes]

I think Strict Mode is a better name.

[BLKNSLVR]

My wife and I don't care about the end result in those situations since the fun has been removed at that point. We just iterate through until we're right or have run through our chances.

On to the next game!