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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> I also toy around with Quordle where you have 9 guesses to find 4 words. That one's harder and the strategy is a little different. There I've pretty much settled on finding a set of 3 words that covers all vowels (and Y) and 9 of the most common consonants.

Yes, in Quordle you're compelled to use a standard opening. Regardless of what you learn from early guesses, no followup can be more informative than just querying more letters.

It's kind of disappointing to me how much luck is involved in Quordle. I've just established that the only common letters in a word are S, A, and Y, with A second and Y fifth. All three other words are already guessed. Do I guess SASSY or SAVVY? The game gives the appearance of being much more skill-based than it actually is.

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There are lots of words like this and it affects Wordle too. Take SHA_E. You have SHAME, SHARE, SHAVE, SHALE, SHAKE and SHAPE. It's highly likely your earlier guesses haven't eliminated all of these. So what you have to do is recognize this situation and throw in a word with all of the possible missing letters to tell you which one is the right one. Obviously you need 2 guesses left at least for this to work.

But I've found the same applied with Quordle. Recently I had _LARE and even that allows FLARE, GLARE and BLARE. It turns out solving another word (BRINE) eliminated one of the options for free.

I've noticed whoever chooses the word of the day for Worlde likes these types of words. Like I've ended up with S_ILL before leaving SPILL, SKILL, STILL and SHILL.

> So what you have to do is recognize this situation and throw in a word with all of the possible missing letters to tell you which one is the right one. Obviously you need 2 guesses left at least for this to work.

This advice applies much better to Wordle than it does to Quordle, though. Quordle gives you nine guesses. Four of them are already taken by the need to provide four answers. Three or four go to your fixed opener. That leaves you either one or two discretionary guesses. If your opener ended up giving you trouble with more than one word, you're basically hosed.

> I've noticed whoever chooses the word of the day for Worlde likes these types of words.

Josh Wardle said on a podcast[1] that him and his partner chose the set of words by taking all 5 letter words in the dictionary and filtering out the "bogus" ones. He then randomized the order of these words so that him and his partner could play. However, I'm not sure if the New York Times has changed how word selection works.

[1] https://syntax.fm/show/430/creator-of-wordle-josh-wardle

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