Quordle today – hints and answers for game #389, Friday, February 17

Quordle should be approached in a different way than Wordle. With four puzzles to solve in nine guesses, you can’t blindly throw letters at them and expect to win – you stand a much better chance if you think strategically.

That is of course also the case in Wordle, but it is even more important in Quordle.

There are two important things to remember.

1. Use multiple initial words

First, you don’t just want a single starting word, but almost certainly two or three beginning words.

The first of these should probably be one of the best Wordle starters because the same things that make them work well apply here too. But after that, you need to choose another word or possibly two that use many more of the most common consonants and contain the remaining vowels.

For example, I currently use STARE > DOILY > PUNCH. Together, these three words use 15 of the 26 letters in the alphabet, including all five vowels, Y, and nine of the most common consonants (S, T, R, D, L, P, N, C, and H). There are plenty of other options – you might want to put an M, B, F or G in it instead of the H, but something like this should suffice.

If all goes well, that will give you a good idea of ​​what one or sometimes two of the answers could be. If not, good luck!

2. Narrow things down

Second, if you come across a word where the answer could easily be one of many options – for example -ATCH, where it could be MATCH, BATCH, LATCH, CATCH, WATCH, HATCH, or PATCH – you’ll definitely want to guess a word that would limit those options.

In Wordle, instead, you can try several in a row and hope one is right, assuming you still have enough guesses. It’s risky, but will work sometimes. In addition, it is the only option in hard mode. But in Quordle this will almost certainly result in failure – you just don’t have enough guesses.

In the above scenario, CLAMP would be a good bet, as it could point the way to four of the seven words at once.