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Before I begin this whine, I need to preface it with a solid declaration that I love word games.
Love. Them.
I love Scrabble, and spelling bees (obviously), and as of today my New York Times crossword completion streak stands at 625 days. That is one year, eight months, and three weeks that I have earned a gold star for completing the puzzle on the day it was published. And my personal solving standards mean I can ask anyone within earshot (Husband) for help on esoteric sports names, but no Googling allowed.
So I not only love word games, but I'm pretty good at them.
But this new word game? The one everyone in the known universe is now playing and bragging about on Facebook and Instagram and who-knows-where else?
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| My usual reaction |
In case you are the single person in the world who has not jumped on the Wordle train, the rules of the free-for-now* game are that you have six chances to guess a five-letter word. When you enter the first word, the game lets you know if you've guessed any letters in the right spot (green!), any letters that are not in the right spot (yellow), and any letters that are wrong (grey or black). Then you have five more guesses. At the end of the six attempts, you have the option to share your results with the world.
Several far-flung MomQueenBee family were early Wordle adopters and started a text thread so that we could share our results among ourselves. Now I know that at a few minutes after 6 a.m. my text notification will chime with news that the East Coast contingent of our text thread has discovered the word. The Central Standard participants come in a couple of hours later, and the rest will check in before the day is over.
So why does this thing that combines words and family and should be my very favorite thing in the world having me clenching my fists and shaking my hairbrush?
Because I don't win.
I have never once, in the month or so that we've been doing this, had the low score in the family. Others have routinely guessed the word in three tries, sometimes even two (which, HOW?). I hover around the four-to-six guess range, and twice have failed to get the word at all.
How can this even be? I am by far not the sharpest knife in this drawer of sharp knives, but I am the only one who makes her living with words. I SHOULD BE WINNING.
So here's what I've decided: I just know too darned many words. Check, for example, the screenshot from a recent day above.
That's my unsuccessful grid in the middle. I had correctly guessed three of the five letters correctly on the first try! Woohoo! This was going to be the day I got it in two tries!
But, spoiler alert, I did not. My whiney "Sometimes I hate this game" was that morning's loving declaration to my children.
The correct word was SHARD. Do you know how many words could be correct for those final two guesses? How about SHARK? And SHARP? And SHARE? Earlier in the game, before the H fell into place, how about SCARF? Or STARK? or SWARM?
So my rationalization of my ineptitude with this game is this: It's a word game, but it's also a game of luck, and I'm not very good at games of luck although I am a champion at overthinking. I do love having all the Boys and Lovely Girls checking in every day, though, so it's well worth being at the bottom of the Wordle pile.
When the Boys were young and of competitive sports-playing age we always sent them off to their games with the same instructions:
Play hard. Play fair. Have a good time. It's just a game.
We omitted the customary "Play to win." because we wanted them to be good sports and to enjoy the competition but to not spend much time thinking about winners and losers. (The dreaded QueenBee lack-of-speed gene did not work in their favor.)
Now it's my turn to remind myself.
Play hard. Play fair. Have a good time. Smile when you hear that chime.
It's just a game.
*The New York Times recently bought rights to this game for a bazillion dollars, so odds are good it won't be free forever.
I do *not* play on hard mode so that if there is something with too many possibilities - like that example - I can go letter-fishing: come up with all the words that *could* work with what we know, and then try to think of a word that has as many disambiguating test letters as possible. (so, if you have 7 words that fit the pattern, then see if there's a word that has four different consonants in it that will either eliminate or confirm 4 - or, I guess, 5, but I've never managed that - out of the 7 possibilities in one word slot)
ReplyDeleteLuck, strategy, vocabulary... and yes, also the ability to say "no, I think that word is a little *too* esoteric to be a wordle result" since they let you use any legitimate word as an attempt, but the word of the day is picked from within a smaller word-set and has to be a more-common word than, oh, I don't know, something like "garth" (which I had to look up the meaning of last week).
Obviously, playing a word you *know* is mostly-wrong reduces your chances of getting the word in 2 or 3 guesses, but it knocks down the "didn't actually get it" percentage by... a lot.
And if you Must Play On Hard Mode because we must always do things in the hardest way possible, then no letter fishing for you! But: it is a strategy, and also it is a strategy that works with, rather than against, having an excessively large vocabulary. :-)
But yep. It really is just a game.
(also: I love your blog.)
I was complaining about SHARD and another one where there were just too many options, and Elizabeth (age 16: knows everything) explained to me that you can't GUESS, you have to SOLVE. So, like, when I'd done SHARK and SHARE and so forth, she said that was GUESSING. The strategy, she says, is once you have some of the letters, figure out all the other letters (or a batch of the other letters) that MIGHT be involved, and make a word out of THEM--to see which letters are correct. But she admits that this is not a strategy that results in 3-guess wins.
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