Wordle ... strange luck

[darkoshi]

I started playing Wordle on Jan. 8, although I forgot and missed several days since then.

So far I've played 16 games and lost once.

The number of guesses it took me each game so far were:
6, 6, 4, 4, 4, 5, (lost), 3, 5, 4, 3, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2.

My first few games, I played in hard mode ("Any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses") without realizing I was doing so.

Then I began to choose words with completely different letters for the first few guesses to more quickly reveal what letters the final word had.

When that began to feel easy, I went back to doing it the "harder" way. 3 days ago I switched it to "hard mode" in the Settings panel, as I was playing it that way anyway.

Those last 3 days' games seem odd to me. I guessed the word correctly on my 2nd try, three times in a row now. The first time I thought I was lucky. The 2nd time I thought I was very lucky. But now the 3rd time, it feels weird and suspicious. How can I be that lucky?

Based on the 2 or 3 letters I guessed right in my first guesses, several words could have fit. Yet I chose the right one each time, apparently.

Comments

[frith]

Solving Wordle on the second guess, three times! Wow! And I thought I was hot the few times I got it in three. 8^D It's a shame that The New York Times has already bought Wordle (for over $1 million). I also play Absurdle, which is like trying to herd a fish, any fish, into a bucket.

[darkoshi]

Today's Wordle took me 4 tries.

I'd read about Absurdle before and thought it would be frustrating. But now that I've tried it, it's actually not that bad.

[frith]

Got it in three. Scarf, shard, scuba, snark and sacks could also have fit the clues I had so far, so I got lucky. ^_^

I tried a tactic with Absurdle: eliminate difficult letters like J, X, Z and W. Five guesses in I has only S and A to work with and I tried 'spald', which wasn't the final word but it was a word. That isn't in my big Webster's. Online it's either a spelling of Spall that fell out of favor 250 years ago or another spelling for spaul, both words I am not familiar with, and apparently, neither is my spell-checker! I think the solution was Smack.

[darkoshi]

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spald
I'm not familiar with it either.

I think I would take the other tactic; leave the difficult letters for last as there should be fewer words that can include them. But I'll have to see how that works out.

[darkoshi]

One aspect of both games that I like is that the final word is limited to common well-known words. That means it is very unlikely to be a word which I (and you and most other people) are not familiar with. So I learned early on that if i don't see any possible words in the remaining letters, I have to keep looking and thinking until an obvious word finally comes to me, rather than thinking it's some obscure word that could potentially be formed from the available letters.

Absurdle is nice in that it feels like there is no "right" word for each turn except the last, so any word I think of using the available letters is a good word. It is a given that the game will keep going as long as any other possible common word remains. So that and there being no limit on the number of turns makes it feel like less pressure.