[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.