You know what Wordle is, right? Sure you do. I’ve seen you checking the answers on our site and pretending you’re smart. You get six tries to guess a five-letter word, and it tells you whenever you get a letter in the right place, in the wrong place, or not in the word at all. This simplicity is what makes it great. But this simplicity is complicated by the Wordle Bot, and I want to put it in a car compactor and watch the light die out in its red blinking eye.

I’ve been playing Wordle for a while. Not necessarily every day, but I’ve kept up with it since it took the world by storm as an independent internet sensation, and made the jump with it over to the NYT. It seemed to dip in the immediate aftermath of going Hollywood (or maybe going Upper East Side), but as the NYT Games app rose in popularity, buoyed 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 for subscribers for a while, and is a tool that analyses your guesses each day to tell you how good they were, and how to improve them. Since I’m just here to play the word games to help myself wake up each morning, I have barely noticed it. However, as part of a current offer for 50 percent off subscription specifically to the Games app (granting access to the full crossword and replayability of some games) the Wordle Bot is being made free on random days. Last weekend was my day, and thus yesterday launched my career as a knock-off Sarah Connor.

The appeal of Wordle is very simple. If you get the word you are a genius, and if you don’t then you are unlucky. I have lost before and thought there was nothing I could have done about it, all my guesses could have been right, they just weren’t. Underneath it all, I know that rather than randomly guessing I could have attempted to knock out letters by racking them up on a guess instead of forcing in green letters I already knew. I also get that if you’re told there’s a C and an A but not a T and you try CATCH just to see if there’s a H in there, I’m not playing the percentages. But when there is a H in there? Hoo boy am I a genius again.

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

Each day, my first word in Wordle is DEATH. Partly because I’m an indie edgy cool kid, but mostly because D, E, A, and T are very common, and H seems like a letter I wouldn’t naturally choose so I know where it falls off the bat. I have a good success rate in Wordle (94 percent), so I must be doing something right. According to Wordle Bot however, I am a big dummy. What the Germans call der dummkopf.

It tells me that less than one percent of people start with DEATH, stupid choice that it is. The ‘meta’ way to start Wordle is with ADIEU. Okay, first off, that’s not even an English word, and second, did the ADIEU sheep get it in two last month when the answer was DEPTH? Didn’t think so.

In any case, on my Bot day, I was told that D, E, and T were all correct letters in the wrong place. I went on as I usually do, trying words that featured D, E, and T in different assortments, and eventually got EDICT on my fourth guess, greatly assisted by a somewhat random stab at EDITS on my third. Usually, this would have made me feel very smart. Wordle Bot had other ideas.

I think EDICT is a pretty great get, especially in four. It’s far less commonly used than most Wordle answers, and pulling EDITS out of the bag only for it to leave me with one gap is a satisfying way to land the Wordle answer. Apparently not. My second answer, after DEATH but before EDITS, was also a less than one percent guess that the Bot made me feel was a wasted try. It was more complimentary about EDITS, but then informed me that EDICT was subsequently so obvious that any achievement gained from the answer was immediately sapped back out of it.

Who is this Bot for? Who is meta gaming their Wordle score? Aside from the potential advice to start with ADIEU, what is there to be learned from knowing that one word you randomly guessed at more routes to the answer than a different random word? There might be some playing the odds involved in your choices, but is that really any fun? Does making Wordle into a maths game rather than a word game actually improve the experience? I have an answer for the Wordle Bot, and it’s the same word I use every day: DEATH.

Wordle

A daily word puzzle game that took the world by storm in 2022, Wordle gives you six chances to guess a five-letter word, revealing how close you are to the answer on each guess through color-coded squares. Created by a software engineer by the name of Josh Wardle, it was purchased by the New York Times in 2022.

Released

October 1, 2021

Developer(s)

Josh Wardle

Publisher(s)

The New York Times Company