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Wordle is one of the most unique, challenging, and enjoyable puzzle games on the web. Because it presents the same puzzle to everyone once per day and is totally free to play, it's become a viral sensation that pops up in group chats and Twitter feeds around the world. Here's everything you need to know about Wordle.
Wordle is a word-guessing game that's similar to games like Mastermind. Your goal is to successfully guess the word of the day, which is a common, five-letter English word. Each time you make a guess, the game tells you which of the letters in the word you chose are in the target word. Letters that are in the right place are highlighted in green, while letters that are found in the target word but in a different location are highlighted in yellow.
Wordle gives you a total of 6 guesses to find the target word. To spice things up, Wordle insists that all 6 of your guesses are five-letter English words. This means that you can't check arbitrary strings like "RSTLN." Instead, you have to think of words that have the right combination of letters in the right places to check the theories you're working on.
Wordle offers you a new puzzle once a day. Each day, however, every player in the world gets to challenge themselves against the same word. Wordle also offers a handy spoiler-free format for posting to social media and group texts. In many circles, it's common to see these Tetris-like arrangements of gray, yellow, and green blocks. People compete informally to try to get the word in as few guesses as possible and post frustrations and thoughts about the word, their guessing strategies, and their streaks.
The "normal" way of playing Wordle allows you to fish for letters in any order. If your first guess is "AROSE," for example, and you know that the A and the E are in the right place, you could then guess LYMPH to try to check 5 new letters at once. Wordle offers a hard mode that prevents this. When playing "hard mode," you have to include yellow and green letters in subsequent guesses. While this might make you take more guesses to find the actual word, it also removes the difficulty of trying to come up with unrelated words with specific combinations of letters, meaning it may actually be easier for some people.
The official Wordle game is hosted on the New York Times' website. If you're hungry for more Wordle, however, you can get unlimited daily puzzles from a number of unlicensed spin-off sites. These sites might not use the same bank of words as the official Wordle site, but they're great places to test out new strategies so you can beat your friends in the official puzzles.
Despite the vast number of players worldwide and the single-puzzle-per-day restriction, most social circles are very free of Wordle spoilers. It's possible to look up the answer to the day's puzzle if you try, but you'll hardly ever find someone intentionally posting the word for free. After all, why would they? You'd be able to beat their score.
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The best way to start a game of Wordle is with a good first guess. Experts suggest a slew of different words, but the behind-the-scenes word list might change over time, removing the slight advantage that the "best" starting word offers over the second-best. Try to use a word with as many of the free "Wheel of Fortune" letters as possible - RSTLNE. Good examples are AROSE, LOSER, and SMILE.
Don't worry too much about finding the absolute best starting word. Instead, try to fit your preferred guessing strategies with a word that matches them. AROSE is a particularly good example of a word that's really, really good for some strategies and really bad for others. You'll often get exactly two yellow tiles on your first guess on the A and the E. There are a lot of words with A and E, and many of them do not start with an A or end with an E. If you're the sort of person who likes using subsequent guesses to narrow down consonants and do some deep thinking between guesses, AROSE will work beautifully. If you'd prefer to get a green square on your first guess to narrow down the pool of words immediately, it's not going to do so hot.
The next step to Wordle dominance is to make sure that every guess you make reveals information. You should split your Wordle games into three phases: your initial guess, gathering information, and making guesses. It's very important that you don't start guessing blindly in the second phase and that you instead think about all of the possibilities for the word and narrow down the field.
As an example, pretend your second guess is GODLY. You get two grey squares and three green squares, meaning the word has to end in DLY. As it turns out, there are at least three very common words that fit the bill here: MADLY, SADLY, and BADLY. Instead of plopping one of these down into the interface, try to narrow down the field. If you can check M, S, and B at the same time (BOSOM), you can guarantee that you'll get the word in two guesses rather than taking up to three. Better still, if your initial assessment was wrong and you forgot about a word, this intermediary guess might reveal that hidden word by forcing a combination of letters you never would have thought of.
If you're willing, you can utilize some gray-area tactics to get the Wordle faster that aren't quite cheating. When your friends post about the Wordle, read what they say. Was the word hard? Did they get stuck with a bunch of green squares looking for the final letter? Did they complain about the word being odd or unusual? If you've discussed Wordle with your friends, you might know what they like to use as their first guess. If Bob said he always picks LOSER first, you can look at Bob's Wordle post and see what the green, yellow, and gray squares are on the first row. This essentially starts you one guess deep, giving you a big advantage over the competition.
What do you think of Wordle? Are there any strategy tips we missed? Do you use a dictionary or other websites to help while you play? Let us know so we can share the best ways to enjoy Wordle together with our friends.
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