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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

I always start with SNAIL ROUTE.

Those are the 10 most common letters in 5-letter words. Even if I get good hits with SNAIL, I enter ROUTE.

I hadn't seen anyone else use that pair when I suggested it in early Jan https://twitter.com/bazzargh/status/1477998502747779079 ... but I guess there aren't many choices with those letters and other people were bound to hit on those words! Seems quite popular now.

For octordle/sedecordle I found that the 2 standard guesses wasn't enough to stop getting stuck, particularly it's missing Y for words that use that as a vowel. For those puzzles, I use INPUT SHAME GLORY, but I've not attempted to check if this is anything like optimal - I very rarely fail those puzzles with these 3 tho.

I don't regularly play octordle but came to the conclusion that you really want at least 3 start words. Otherwise, you start trying to solve with guesses that aren't globally optimum and run out of guesses.

STARE DOING CHUMP is usually enough for me to have a good stab at Quordle. For regular Wordle I try to stick to "hard mode", with the constraint that discovered letters have to be used.

I have settled on DREAM PILOT (I often don't use pilot if I get 2 or more yellow/green) with no reason other than I'm pig headed and refuse strategies others suggest.

I play in Hard Mode, so that type of method rarely works

I've also been playin on hard mode almost since the beginning. While it usually does make the game more interesting, it also annoyingly often makes your win depend on pure luck. Ironically this happens more often when your first guesses were very good.

Imagine having SHA?E confirmed and now being forced to stupidly guess between SHAPE, SHAKE, SHARE, SHAME, SHAVE or SHADE instead of eliminating half of those possibilities with a single word.

So maybe this implementation of a hard mode isn't well suited anyway if you're looking for a bigger challenge in skill.

I found that only happens if you try to hit the most common letters in your first guesses. If you use middle of the road letters you tend to get only a couple while eliminating a lot - s and e would be bad early letters because they don’t reduce enough words

Yeah I started off only playing hard mode until they threw in a SHA?E word. Then I realized it's only hard because it isn't fair.

If you run into that situation, then just turn off hard mode and put PRIDE to eliminate some words.

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