[ar_lan]

Absolutely - when they choose ridiculous words like "PATCH".

WATCH HATCH BATCH CATCH LATCH MATCH

There, I made 6 near-perfect guesses that would have cost me the game if I started with any one of them.

This is so infuriating. I've lost I think 3 times already because of this type of word choice.

Note: This is only relevant if you play on the hard-mode, which enforces you re-use guessed letters that have already been signaled as correct.

[lowkey_]

If the objective is to simply win rather than to win in the fewest number of tries, it can be valuable to spend a guess on exploring the problem space rather than guessing the word outright:

Once you know every letter is correct except the W after the first guess, you can think of the missing letter in the possible correct words (HBCLMP), and put together a word like "CHOMP" to eliminate a lot of potential guesses.

[dwringer]

This is the most interesting aspect of Wordle to me, and the fact that hard-mode pretty much breaks it along with leading to random no-win situations basically ruined Wordle for me. Sure, I can just play it without hard mode - but then my friends and I aren't playing the same game.

[ghaff]

It can be a somewhat different game depending on who you play "with." You probably follow different strategies if your primary strategy is not to lose vs. if you're strategy is to get the best score you can (as my group does). I figure that I will only go for two if I come out of the first guess with a lot of information. But otherwise, I do generally shoot for 3.

[kibibyte]

Personally, I think that’s what makes hard mode interesting, that it creates a sort of meta-game for figuring out a reliable way to avoid these pathological cases.

It likely does mean you’ll have to sacrifice a lower average guess count in favor of avoiding losses.

[DonaldFisk]

I've stopped playing Wordle, after I missed it twice. My strategy was to use up letters of the alphabet in rough order of frequency: STONE, LAIRD, CHUMP, GAWKY, but occasionally varying the choice of the next word when I could think of a better one.

If the word was PATCH, like most other times I would have played

    S(T)ONE

    L[A]IRD

    (C)(H)UM(P)

after which PATCH is obvious. If you hadn't played that strategy, but you knew it was ?ATCH, you should divide up the candidate initial letters P, W, H, B, C, L, M: e.g. BLAME, CLAMP (neither of these is possible, but you would gain information). CLAMP would have confirmed it was PATCH. If neither word helped, you would at least know the unknown letter is W or H: two more guesses at worst.

I did once fail to guess after six tries. The word was FOYER.

The new game looks interesting, and the strategy winning (failing to choose the word) is less obvious.

[ar_lan]

This strategy doesn't work on hard mode, which is the main problem. I think it is essentially a separate game.

[function_seven]

Oh those are the worst. There should be a term for that early success curse when playing it on Hard Mode. Getting a bunch of greens right off the bat can be a kiss of death.

[andrewflnr]

I've heard "canyon of doom".

[mimimi31]

I like it. I wonder if you could calculate how evil a solution would be in that regard, i.e. how likely you are to end up in a canyon. Maybe you could count how many substrings also occur in other valid words or something.

[ghaff]

I never dove into the topic any deeper but I suspect that there is probably cryptanalysis literature related to letter string frequency--or just take a dictionary and brute force a substring frequency analysis.

[benatkin]

Usually I can solve a Wordle in a few minutes, but sometimes it takes a really long time, like 20 minutes if I don't give up. Two days ago I started playing during the last few minutes of the NBA game and didn't get the right answer until after the game was over. It took me 20 minutes and in the process I entered a word I didn't know about but that was in the dictionary. The correct word was a word I knew about but that was quite different from other words, including the one I guessed just by iterating through possible words.

I still got it though. Those ones that rhyme with other words, especially if I blow through some of my guesses before finding most of the letters, are quick to answer but are typically the ones where I lose.

[dhosek]

I think that it’s within appropriate etiquette if you reveal a past answer. I remember learning a couple new words on the way to VOUCH from _OUCH (MOUCH and LOUCH to be precise).

[testplzignore]

That's part of the fun! My current strategy is to never use "H" in my letter-elimination guesses, and never use "E" if I've already matched "S" and "A". I learned my lesson after winning on a 50/50 guess on one of the SHA_E days.

[Dylan16807]

Wordle is simply not meant to be played on hard mode.

[andrewflnr]

Yes, very silly to deliberately choose the mode that makes those words nigh impossible to guess, and then blame the word choice. If you want to make the game harder, try to bring down your guess count.

[pbhjpbhj]

Meh, on normal mode it resolves down to can you solve a 5-letter anagram with placement clues. I pick a new starting word each day (definitely sub-optimal) and play hard mode.

To each their own.

[function_seven]

I started one a few days ago with DIVVY.

I was in the mood for either a crazy 1-guess win or a longer road otherwise.

Game gets lame if you’re always using “statistically engineered” guesses.

[gre]

Same, my first try LEDGE is not the optimal starting word.

[evandale]

It got way too easy and boring to use the same word. It's common amongst my friends to have multiple guesses queued up based on what the first word clues give them. I usually just yolo it and for once my awful memory works for me - I can barely remember my first guess from the previous day let alone the subsequent guesses so every day is a brand new game with a different strategy every day.

[ghaff]

I usually do a two word opening sequence and go on from that in normal mode. Seems a reasonable compromise.

I actually tired of the multiword Wordle "clones" for the reason that you say. I found you pretty much had to do a 3 or 4 word opening sequence and then mostly solve anagrams. Otherwise you end up wasting too many guesses trying to solve one word that has a lot of options.

[andrewflnr]

Only if you're not aggressive enough. :)

As you said, to each their own. But the original point is, don't blame the word selection when "your own" doesn't work out.

[zwieback]

That's me, sometimes it takes me many minutes to pick a starting word I haven't used yet, usually I look around the room until I spot something with five letters.

[ar_lan]

Why offer the mode, then?

[andrewflnr]

My guess is it was an easy, logical thing to add, and he didn't immediately see that some words would be impossible to solve. And you can't just delete a feature, even if the stakes were bigger than some players opting into extra frustration.

[NikolaNovak]

While I agree with the spirit of your message, I feel you're addressing the title without actually having clicked it ;)

[sateesh]

Along with these ones that are hard for me to get right are when the letters are repeated.

[ghaff]

Repeated letters are one of the things that tend to get me. Others are:

- Uncommon letters (I tend to mentally skip over them because they're uncommon.)

- Words that differ from the "usual" pronunciation for a pattern, like having a glottal stop. When I'm pronouncing some pattern mentally in the usual way I can end up skipping past a valid word because I'm mentally pronouncing it wrong.

[ghaff]

Today was actually a fairly bad one for that.

Even if you don't play hard mode it can be difficult to eliminate even 3 less common letters or so in one shot.

[filmgirlcw]

Yeah, I could have had today’s in two but it took me four moves because of the options with the third letter.

[zwieback]

Yeah, those are the worst ones. Rare, though, for me. Maybe ran into this a couple times and cost me my only loss so far.

[jquery]

Seems like you need to avoid guesses that can get you trapped like that, and therein lies the extra difficulty, no?