Today’s Wordle answer is so tough it nearly cost me my 680-day streak – don’t make my mistake when playing it
Today’s Wordle is one of the hardest we’ve had so far in 2023. It’s the kind of game that makes dedicated Wordlers tear their hair out in frustration. It will lead to many curse words. It will spoil many a breakfast.
And of course, it will end many a long-running series. In fact, it almost cost me mine. But as tough as this Wordle is, my pain is also self-inflicted – because I made some major mistakes that should have been consigned to the dustbin of history long ago.
To explain what they were, I have to record it SPOILERS FOR TODAY’S WORD, GAME #878, ON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2023. So don’t read on if you haven’t already done so. Please note that you may need some Wordle hints before doing this.
How hard?
Before I get into my mistakes, let’s talk about today’s Wordle word and exactly how difficult it was.
The answer to game #878, assuming you’ve played it by now **FINAL SPOILER ALERT**, is SASSY – and it doesn’t take a genius to see what the big deal is with it. Or rather, what the three problems are, namely that triple S.
I have a pretty good idea of how difficult each Wordle is thanks to WordleBot, the NYT’s subscription-only AI-powered utility tool. Every day, WordleBot analyzes the games of everyone who plays and reports an average score for them. And today it says that people solve the problem in an average of five guesses.
I’ve been recording those average scores since WordleBot launched in April 2022, giving a few games here and there and have a list of all 318 so far in 2023. Of those just six games – JAZZY (5.5 average score), RIPER (5.4), JOKER (5.4), NANNY (5.2), KAZOO (5.1) and VERVE (5.1) – are harder than the current SASSY. COWER, meanwhile, equated to 5.0.
Why it’s so hard: Like I said, it’s because of that three times repeated S.
Only 20 of Wordle’s 2,309 original answers contained a triple letter – so just 0.87% of all games. And it just so happens that S gets the triple treatment in just two answers, the other being SISSY, which was the solution in June 2021, game #2 – so long before any of us were playing.
The other games that have had three of the same letters so far are ERROR (game #71), FLUFF (#382), MUMMY (#491), NANNY (#714) and most recently DADDY (#833), at the end of September.
In short: this is an unusual phenomenon. But it gets worse, because SASSY is also suffering from another Wordle problem.
Too many answers
Some of the most difficult Wordle words owe their amazing properties to the number of alternative answers that have the same pattern, but with only one or two different letters.
A classic example is an answer like DOG – because there are seven alternative words that differ only by the first letter: ROUND, SOUND, MOUND, FOUND, POUND, BOUND and WOUND.
SASSY isn’t that bad, but if you had the SA–Y part, as many of you probably did, you could have had a dozen words to choose from: SAUCY, SANDY, SAPPY, SAGGY, SAVVY, SAVOY, SALLY , SADLY, SALTY, SAMEY, SATAY and SASSY herself. I don’t know if they’re all real Wordle answers, but it’s probably all occurred to some people.
And this is where I screwed up.
First, I failed to make a good list of which words could actually be answers. After my second guess, SALAD, I had six left, according to WordleBot. But you can’t use WordleBot until the game is finished, so I didn’t know that at the time and just came up with three myself. These were SAVVY, SAGGY and SAPPY, but somehow I missed SAUCY, SASSY and SAVOY.
This was almost a fatal mistake. Obviously you can’t always think of all the possible answers, but if there are only six left, you should be able to find more than half of them.
Second, I didn’t carefully narrow down these three words in my next guess. Unless you’re playing Wordle on hard mode – which forces you to include letters you’ve already found on each successive guess – there are times when it’s much better to give up the idea of a good score and instead to concentrate on securing your streak.
This includes playing “throwaway words,” especially words that cannot be the answer but limit the options. Essentially you accept that you are not going to score 3/6 or 4/6, but play a few carefully chosen words that guarantee a safe 5/6.
I really should have done this today, maybe play something like PONGY. This would have told me that the answer couldn’t be SAPPY or SAGGY, while confirming that the answer ended with a Y. I would then have played SAVVY and been wrong, but crucially I now had two guesses and two words left had to choose from (SAUCY and SASSY).
Instead, I played SAVVY third, SAGGY fourth, and SAPPY fifth, leaving me with a 50/50 between SASSY and SAUCY on my final guess.
I’ve been jealously guarding my streak since I started playing Wordle in December 2021, reaching 680 games without a loss in that time. And today I could have lost it simply because I didn’t follow my own rules and play with a little bit of caution.
As luck would have it, I survived unscathed – I suspected SASSY without ever realizing SAUCY was a possibility, but I rode my luck and ended up with a last gasp 6/6. But it could so easily have been different.
So yeah, today’s Wordle is really hard, but I made it worse than it had to be. Next time I’ll be more careful.