ARISE
Ding! goes my phone every single morning at 7 am For the past year, that sound has meant only one thing: it’s time for my daily communion with friends.
Most days, either Joe or Nana-Ama, my Wordle-playing buddies, have already finished that day’s puzzle and shared their result by the time I get up. Nama-Ama is the night owl and international jet-setter who usually does it first, often followed by Joe, the early riser. After all, you get to know your friends’ everyday rhythms when you’re on a daily group text.
Just don’t tell me Joe solved it in only two moves again today. … You have to know this about Joe, an award-winning journalist who cut his teeth in the rolling world of alternative weekly newspapers (when that was still a thing): He’ll either playfully crow that he’s the king of the world or he ‘ll attempt to be earnest and humble — which isn’t really his style.
On the other hand, if I see that Nana-Ama didn’t solve the puzzle until the penultimate fifth row, or, shocker of shockers, even the final sixth row, I know it’s going to be a tough one. If she struggled — she, the accomplished author, editor and political speechwriter who speaks four languages and is working on her fifth (Portuguese) — then my meager brain has a snowball’s chance in Hades.
Time for me to get out of bed, make some coffee and kickstart those neurons.
START
One cup of coffee later, I’m anticipating the thrill of all the letters lighting up. My teen son teases me that it’s my “nerd joy.”
For the few among you who remain uninitiated in all things Wordle — after all, it’s said that tens of millions of people play this game — let me explain: It is a free online game where players get six attempts to guess a five-letter word . With each guess, tiles light up in one color to tell you if you’ve guessed a correct letter in the right position, or light up in another color to indicate you got a correct letter but it’s in the wrong position. If no tiles light up at all then, sorry pal, you’ve got nuthin’.
For as ingrained as it has become in the daily rituals of millions of people like me, it’s hard to believe the game has only been around since 2021. The lore goes that a Welsh web engineer, Josh Wardle, created the game as a gift for his sweetheart who loved word games, dubbing it Wordle as a play on his own surname.
Once he put it up online, the simple-yet-at-times-maddening puzzler became a worldwide sensation (The New York Times bought it from Wardle, but has kept it free to play). Of course, it just happened to land during a global pandemic when we were all starved for ways to interact with others. But I think its popularity is owed to more than that.
HEART
I’ll argue that a big part of this little game’s appeal is in its very creation. It is a gift of love. It was made to be a form of connection — maybe that’s behind our impulse to share our results with others.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that an actual “share” button pops up after you finish, entreating you to pass along your thrill of victory — or agony of defeat. (I think about my grandmother, the kind of person who did the newspaper crossword every day of her adult life, folding the paper with crisp corners to create a rectangle she could hold with one hand while wielding her No. 2 pencil sharpened to military precision with the other. She would have happily bragged her daily success to neighbors and family if that had been as easy as pressing “send.”)
It’s been years since I made a habit of regular meet-ups with friends and colleagues for lunch or coffee — the demands of getting my son to school, juggling work deadlines, the aforementioned pandemic, killed the habit. But in some ways, my morning text exchange with Joe and Nana-Ama feels like we’re meeting at the corner coffee shop — even though we are miles, sometimes time zones, sometimes continents, from each other.
We trade results, encourage, celebrate or gently rib each other — Who am I kidding? It’s mostly Joe we rib! — and then we often trade a few thoughts about life, maybe about the latest headlines, our families, our health (complaints).
I don’t even remember how this daily trading of our Wordle efforts got started among the three of us — while both Joe and Nana-Ama are colleagues, they are each from different parts of my life. I don’t think we’ve ever all been in the same room at the same time. But now we’ve evolved into the Wordling Musketeers. Our little exchanges have become precious to me, because even though I’m blessed to have many, many good friends, family, children and a marriage, my Wordle group somehow reminds me to feel gratitude for it all.
PEACE
Speaking of marriage, is it weird that my husband and I both play Wordle daily and never talk about it with each other?
Well, that’s not totally true. He gave me a hint once when I was stuck for half a day after my third guess. And I still didn’t get it. (Hence I will forevermore view the word KNOLL as my nemesis.)
And therein lies the problem, I suppose. My husband is better than I am at most games. You don’t even want to know how many times he’s wiped the board with me at Scrabble.
And he’s the one in the family who dropped out of college after not quite a semester.
So maybe our not sharing is our unspoken strategy for maintaining marital peace. Who wants to go to marriage counseling over five letters?
BEGIN
I mean, I don’t even know my husband’s Wordle starting word strategy.
Behind every Wordler (yes, that’s what they call us) is some cockamamie formula for choosing a starting word that will provide enough letters and clues about their placement to solve the Wordle in the fewest number of turns.
Some people swear by consonant-heavy words like CHART — and will present the statistical evidence for why that’s bound to work. Some swear by vowel-rich words like ADIEU — and, you guessed it, will present the statistical evidence for why that’s bound to work.
Then again, some people show themselves to be romantic and whimsical in their choices. Nana-Ama reports that her daughter starts the puzzle every day with SQUID, despite the low odds that a winning word will include the letter Q. She’s nevertheless convinced that one day, if she plays long enough, that’s going to be the day’s word and she’ll have it on the first try.
I love her strategy because it reminds me to be bold, have faith and a sense of optimism.
But I don’t love it enough to start my own guesses with SQUID.
More ‘Games People Play’
This story is part of a collection of stories printed in September 2024.
Low-tech, high entertainment: Why an old game appeals to new pinball wizards
Dungeons & Dragons turns 50 this year. What’s its enduring appeal?
Why the ancient game of bocce ball is on a roll
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SOLVE
I’m more of a STARE, SAINT and ARISE type myself. Not that they’re guaranteed to get me to the end faster, but because I’ve become a person who appreciates predictability and routine. Call it the inevitable evolution into middle age, maybe.
At any rate, no matter where I start, the puzzle usually takes me less than five minutes to get through. It’s the kind of thing that’s just enough of a challenge to make you feel competent. True, every once in a while I’ll get really stuck and have to put it down, do something else for a while, and then return. Rarely do I not get it at all (curse you, KNOLL!), but those times can make me rethink that whole “competent” feeling…
Fortunately, I know Joe and Nana-Ama are just one text message away, always there to encourage and commiserate. “Friend” isn’t five letters, but it’s always the right word.