Is the Wordle Bot the most annoying helper ever?

You know what Wordle is, right? Of course. I’ve seen you checking the answers on our website and pretending to be clever. You have six attempts to guess a five-letter word, and it tells you whenever you have a letter in the right place, the wrong place, or not in the word at all. That simplicity is what makes it so great. But that simplicity is complicated by the Wordle Bot, and I want to put it in a car press and watch the light in its blinking red eye go out.

I’ve been playing Wordle for a while. Not necessarily every day, but I’ve been around since it took the world by storm as an independent internet sensation and made the jump to the NYT. Immediately after moving to Hollywood (or maybe the Upper East Side), it seemed to take a nosedive, but as the popularity of the NYT Games app grew, spurred by the popularity of Connections and The Mini alongside Wordle, it has returned to the spotlight. And with it comes the Wordle Bot.

The Wordle Bot has been available to subscribers for a while now and is a tool that analyses your guesses every day to tell you how good they were and how you can improve them. Since I’m just here to play the word games to help me wake up each morning, I’ve barely noticed it. However, as part of a current offer for 50% off the subscription specifically for the games app (with access to the full crossword and replayability of some games), the Wordle Bot is being offered for free on selected days. Last weekend was my day and so yesterday started my career as a Sarah Connor copy.

The appeal of Wordle is simple. If you guess the word, you’re a genius, and if you don’t, you’re out of luck. I’ve lost before and thought there was nothing I could do about it, all my guesses could have been right but they weren’t. Deep down, I know that instead of just guessing, I could have tried eliminating letters by piling them up as I guessed, rather than typing in green letters I already knew. I also understand not betting on the percentages when you’re told there’s a C and an A but no T, and you try CATCH just to see if there’s an H in there. But if there’s an H in there? Man, am I a genius again.

Wordle Bot breaks that simplicity. It makes you feel stupid even when you win, which defeats the point of Wordle. There are no life skills taught in this game. I never learn new words. Being good at Wordle is not a system I want to hack, I just want to wake up my brain.

Every day, my first word in Wordle is DEATH. Partly because I’m a cool, edgy indie kid, but mostly because D, E, A, and T are very common, and H looks like a letter I wouldn’t naturally choose, so I know immediately where it belongs. I have a good success rate in Wordle (94 percent), so I must be doing something right. According to the Wordle Bot, however, I’m a big dumb-ass. What the Germans call the Dummkopf.

That tells me that less than one percent of people start with DEATH, what a stupid decision that is. The “meta” way to start Wordle is with ADIEU. Okay, first of all, that’s not even an English word, and second of all, did the ADIEU sheep manage it in two sentences last month when the answer was DEPTH? I thought so.

Anyway, on my bot day I was told that D, E and T were all the right letters in the wrong place. I carried on as usual, trying words containing D, E and T in various combinations, and finally got EDICT on the fourth try, although a somewhat random attempt at EDITS on the third try helped me a lot. Normally this would have made me feel very clever. Wordle Bot had other ideas.

I think EDICT is a pretty good catch, especially in four. It’s used far less often than most Wordle answers, and pulling EDITS out of the hat only to have a gap is a satisfying way to get the Wordle answer. Apparently not. My second answer, after DEATH but before EDITS, was also a less than one percent rate, which the bot made me think was a wasted effort. It was rather flattering about EDITS, but then informed me that EDICT was so obvious afterwards that any success gained from the answer was immediately cancelled out.

Who is this bot for? Who is metagaming their Wordle score? Aside from the possible advice to start with ADIEU, what can you learn from knowing that a word you randomly guessed has more paths to the answer than another random word? You could play with randomness a little in your decisions, but is that really fun? Does making Wordle a math game instead of a word game actually improve the gaming experience? I have an answer for the Wordle bot, and it’s the same word I use every day: DEATH.

Wordle

Wordle is a daily word puzzle game that took the world by storm in 2022. It gives you six chances to guess a five-letter word, using color-coded squares to show you how close you are to the answer on each try. It was developed by a software developer named Josh Wardle and was purchased by The New York Times in 2022.

Approved

October 1, 2021

developer

Josh Wardle

Publisher)

The New York Times Company