Tag Archives: Wordle

Finally, I Gave In

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All right. I admit it. At last I’m doing what the cool kids do. I’m playing Wordle daily.

I resisted for as long as I could. I even wrote a blog post about how I was not going to succumb. I found it annoying when every day I saw people posting on Facebook what their scores were. That trend seems to have stopped, or at least pulled back. Now, most people only share their results when they get the word in two or three guesses.

My first brush with Wordle came when I was visiting friends in Michigan. Leslie was playing Wordle while someone else drove. She was having a hard time with one particular word and was down to her last try. I looked over her shoulder at the puzzle and said, “Prism.”

“That could work.”

It did.

“You’re good at this. You should be playing it.”

But I resisted. I’ve long been a fan of crossword puzzles and anacrostics. I’ve also done a lot of sudoku and right now I’m obsessed with jigsaw sudoku. (This is an insidious form of the puzzle in which, instead of neat little square blocks, each area is some other shape. A “U” or a snake or some unidentifiable blob. The rules are the same. Each shape contains nine little squares, which must contain the numbers from one to nine. Each row and column must also contain one through nine. But I digress.) (My husband’s famous quote regarding sudoku is, “I may not be able to spell, but goddamit, I can count to nine!” But I digress some more.)

Then one day, one of my writing buddies, Mary Jo, sang the praises of Wordle. “You should try it,” she said. “It takes less than five minutes a day.” (Jigsaw sudoku takes longer than that.)

So, okay. If Mary Jo recommended it, I decided I would try it. I’ve played it every day since, so it’s all her fault.

I have my routine. My first and second words are always the same. They give me all the vowels (including Y) and at least three of the most common consonants. I’ve solved it in three tries more times than six, but four is my usual. I’ve learned to hate words that have several possible choices for the missing letter, like STEA—it could be STEAM, STEAK, STEAD, or STEAL, and if I run out of guesses, I’m screwed. Then there was the time the word was PENNE. Two double letters. Only one letter was revealed by my first two guesses. But I got it!

When I reached a streak of 30 consecutive completions, I told Mary Jo. She admitted, faux-modestly, that her record was 390 days. (I’m sure it’s even more by now.)

Then I found out her secret: She cheats.

(Okay, technically, I guess you can’t call it cheating. She has Wordle buddies that consult with her daily and give each other hints. (I’m not one of them, [sob!].) She refers to the complete list of words that have been Wordle solutions, so that she won’t get hung up on STEA if STEAM has already been used. I didn’t even know the list existed until recently. But I digress again.)

I won’t say I’m addicted to Wordle, but if I’m up after midnight, I do go directly to the Wordle page on the NYT site and try my brain. I tell my husband my score daily. (I don’t do so well on Spelling Bee. Sometimes I can guess at least one word just by looking at it. Other times, I simply can’t, no matter how long I study it. So I don’t. But I digress some more.)

Anyway, I now expect my friends to laugh and point (insofar as you can point online). Especially Mary Jo.

What the Cool Kids Do

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Playing Wordle is the newest obsession among the cool kids. And I have never been a cool kid.

Let me say first that I am not in. This screenshot is taken from a friend’s Facebook feed. He tried nobly to resist the lure of Wordle, but ultimately gave in and got in.

For those not in the know, Wordle is the newest internet craze, a word game (almost certainly a portmanteau of “word” and “puzzle”) that asks you to guess letters and determine what the target words actually are. To me, it’s sort of like Wheel of Fortune combined with Hangman. It’s supposed to improve your general brain health.

Every day there is a new puzzle, and people post their scores on the internet. (Not everyone is happy about this. I have heard complaints from friends about the number of Wordle scores clogging up their news feeds. It does seem an awful lot like bragging, at least when their scores are low. Another friend is hoping to see “floccinaucinihilipilification” show up as one of the daily words, which seems unlikely, as the words are only five letters long. Perhaps eventually they will have a 29-letter version. But I digress.)

It’s not like I haven’t had my clickie game addictions. I used to be a devotée of Candy Crush, Pet Rescue, and Bingo Blitz. I’d play several games of each nearly every day. My husband would ask me, “When are you going to be off the computer?” I would answer, “After I lose the next game.” I never bought any of the “power-ups” that cost actual money, though, which is probably why I kept losing.

I don’t know if Wordle sells hints or letters or power-ups or whatever. I didn’t know how the game designers made their money at all. I thought maybe they were selling users’ info to data mining sites or Russian trolls or something. Then I found out. The New York Times bought Wordle. I don’t need to ask how they’re going to monetize it. I used to solve the New York Times Crossword Puzzle regularly, which did cost money to play. I had forgotten that I had a subscription to it, which you can get without subscribing to the actual New York Times. I only recently remembered that I had a subscription to it and started playing again, though it happens that I like the acrostics more than the actual crosswords.

(I once worked at a place where they came down on me pretty hard for solving crosswords during working hours. I justified it on the grounds that I don’t smoke and never took a cigarette break. I thought taking a puzzle break was therefore justified. The powers-that-were didn’t agree. But I digress. Again.)

In addition to the aforementioned clickie games, I have dabbled in other online games that I felt were a cut above the run-of-the-mill inane ones, ones that ask a player to build a hypothetical theme park or solve a not-so-hidden objects puzzle. Once I played a lot of Words With Friends, back when that was the thing the cool kids did. I’m a word nerd, so I did pretty well, but I learned that people who were skilled at hitting the double letter and triple word score squares could take me down.

Will I continue to be unattracted by the admittedly fascinating lure of Wordle? Or will I be like my friend and eventually say, “I’m in”?

I’ve generally reveled in my not-a-cool-kid status. Why should I give it up for Wordle? It’s not like I need another time-sink. Facebook already serves me too well at that. And I don’t need to get rid of all those game addictions only to succumb to yet another. If I want to improve my mind, I’ll just read a book.

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