My Wordle stats and what I find interesting about them

First I have to ask, do you know the online game Wordle?

It is a simple yet quite entertaining game in which you have to find a 5-letter word in six lines. No hints other than colours showing which letters are placed at the correct spot (green), incorrect spot (yellow) and which do not occur in the sought word (grey). Only words can be entered, not random clusters of letters. Of course you see the letters in the cells but when you want to share your results, the boxes are empty not to spoil someone else’s game.

There is a small keyboard depictured under the 5×6 matrix where the letters are marked in the same colours as you go through the game so it is easier to see which letters have or have not been used and how well.

The game currently resides HERE, at the New York Times website, so if this sounds fun to you, go and give it a try.

I got hooked on the game right away when I tried it first on February 1st, 2022, I’ve missed only a few games since that first encounter. Solving Wordle has become part of my daily routine and I love the challenge. It is addictive but in a good way and it does not take long. Sometimes it takes just a few seconds (really!), sometimes several minutes, rarely longer than 15 minutes.

There are various pieces of advice regarding tactics – which word to start with and how to proceed. Frankly, I always start with an absolutely random word that comes to my mind and despite that, I guess my results are not bad at all.

Luck is important but also certain gut feeling, if it makes any sense. I do not like to fail and the less lines needed the happier I am but sometimes I am really happy about coming up with applicable words no matter the result… After all, English is not my mother tongue…

I keep track of all my results and of all the words, I keep print screens of all my finished games. And I even put the results into a simple graph to see what my results look like and how they change in time. So now I come to the stats I titled this post with. And you know what I found out? In the 1 and half year, the stats look very similar…

Just have a look at the overviews taken at June 11, 2022 – 131 games played; January 23, 2023 – 349 games played; and July 29, 2023 – 536 games played:

I love making such overviews and evaluating data and I would have expected that as I was gradually completing further games, the stats would deviate significantly. Surprisingly enough (at least for me), the course of the results seems quite stable. I am not getting markedly better or worse, that wonderful Gaussian curve shows very similar probability of occurrence throughout the monitored period. Interesting, isn’t it?

Well, such a simple game, and so much fun… 🙂