⬛🟨🟩Words, words, word-le🟩🟨⬛

I’ve always loved word games. Crosswords, word searches, Scrabble, Upwords, Boggle and now in the digital era, Words with Friends and the latest jam, Wordle. My bell curve for success is getting better as I get used to the way Wordle works and my discovery that far from making the game harder, “Hard mode” actually makes it easier. Hard mode only allows you to change the letters that come up grey in previous attempts. If you get a green letter you’d want to re-use it anyway, but any yellow letters also need to be re-used in new words, albeit in different positions.

If Wordle just isn’t enough words per day, you now also have the choice of Dordle or even Quordle to really up your game. In Dordle, you need to solve two five-letter words simultaneously, while Quordle increases that to four. You get more attempts (seven for Dordle and nine for Quordle) but it’s all about your initial word. You want something that gets in several vowels and it would be good to include common consonant matches, too. Some people swear by TARES, others by CHEAT (because of the CH or TH pair). I spin CHEAT around to make TEACH, appropriate for me, but I also like the more leftfield QUOIT, QUOIN or ADIEU.

By limiting the games to only one new word, or set of words, per day, the addictive quality of such games (for me) is somewhat reduced, but you do end up envisioning loads of words with fivel eters…