[jmyeet]

I used to start with ADIEU because it contains 4 vowels and the most common ones at that. But I've since moved on from that because I found I would be forced to reuse vowels in words 3 or 4.

I'm vaguely tempted to take the dictionary and figure out an optimal strategy that 1) guarantees success and 2) minimizes the number of guesses. If you assume every word is equally possible (it isn't; they're manually chosen) there would be an optimal starting word. I'm sure others have looked into this but this is something I'd like to do myself.

After that it branches depending on what hits you get on that first word. It may be possible that a second fixed word (or a small set of second words easily memorized) would be near-optimal but not actually optimal. I'd be curious to know this too.

But I'm curious how good an optimal strategy would be vs some of the naive strategies we've all chosen.

It's also an interesting question as to when it's worth switching from finding what letters are in the word vs locking down their position. If you get COAST and AT are in the word but in the wrong position, should your next attempt be 5 new letters or a word containing AT in different positions? The disadvantage of this of course is you're only testing 3 new letters.

I also toy around with Quordle where you have 9 guesses to find 4 words. That one's harder and the strategy is a little different. There I've pretty much settled on finding a set of 3 words that covers all vowels (and Y) and 9 of the most common consonants.

[vikingerik]

I've tried going both ways with vowels (lots or sparingly), and I found it seems to work better to conserve them. Vowels are where you can maximize information by inference rather than by spending your limited slots, by downplaying or ruling out more vowels once you've got what are likely enough.

I always go 5 new letters for the second guess and usually for the third. Knowing more letters are in or out is a lot more information than finding out the same letter isn't in a second position. Particularly for Quordle, you really want more letters through three or even four guesses.

[thaumasiotes]

> I also toy around with Quordle where you have 9 guesses to find 4 words. That one's harder and the strategy is a little different. There I've pretty much settled on finding a set of 3 words that covers all vowels (and Y) and 9 of the most common consonants.

Yes, in Quordle you're compelled to use a standard opening. Regardless of what you learn from early guesses, no followup can be more informative than just querying more letters.

It's kind of disappointing to me how much luck is involved in Quordle. I've just established that the only common letters in a word are S, A, and Y, with A second and Y fifth. All three other words are already guessed. Do I guess SASSY or SAVVY? The game gives the appearance of being much more skill-based than it actually is.

[jmyeet]

There are lots of words like this and it affects Wordle too. Take SHA_E. You have SHAME, SHARE, SHAVE, SHALE, SHAKE and SHAPE. It's highly likely your earlier guesses haven't eliminated all of these. So what you have to do is recognize this situation and throw in a word with all of the possible missing letters to tell you which one is the right one. Obviously you need 2 guesses left at least for this to work.

But I've found the same applied with Quordle. Recently I had _LARE and even that allows FLARE, GLARE and BLARE. It turns out solving another word (BRINE) eliminated one of the options for free.

I've noticed whoever chooses the word of the day for Worlde likes these types of words. Like I've ended up with S_ILL before leaving SPILL, SKILL, STILL and SHILL.

[daem]

> I've noticed whoever chooses the word of the day for Worlde likes these types of words.

Josh Wardle said on a podcast[1] that him and his partner chose the set of words by taking all 5 letter words in the dictionary and filtering out the "bogus" ones. He then randomized the order of these words so that him and his partner could play. However, I'm not sure if the New York Times has changed how word selection works.

[1] https://syntax.fm/show/430/creator-of-wordle-josh-wardle

[thaumasiotes]

> So what you have to do is recognize this situation and throw in a word with all of the possible missing letters to tell you which one is the right one. Obviously you need 2 guesses left at least for this to work.

This advice applies much better to Wordle than it does to Quordle, though. Quordle gives you nine guesses. Four of them are already taken by the need to provide four answers. Three or four go to your fixed opener. That leaves you either one or two discretionary guesses. If your opener ended up giving you trouble with more than one word, you're basically hosed.

[prawn]

I play a bit of practice Quordle with a best streak of 97. I start TREAD and SONIC*, then usually HULKY or sometimes BULKY, LYMPH or PLUMB. Whether I use HULKY third usually depends on the prevalence of Ts or Cs. If I'm confident of a word after the first 1-2 lines, I'll obviously go with that as it's a free hit in uncovering more letters or position clues for the other words.

My 9yo loves Quordle also but usually starts TREAD and MINOS.

[dsteffee]

I actually find Dordle to be more fun than either of Wordle or Quordle, strangely.