These Three Starting Words Help Me Consistently Beat Quordle

Photo by Piotr Łaskawski on Unsplash

I used to suck at Quordle.

So sucky that I’d often found myself having to pick the fourth word out of two, on occasion three 😬, viable options.

They say leaderboards and gamification make the world go round.

While Quordle doesn’t have a Leaderboard, my high school WhatsApp group had that one goddamn Shakespeare who would make it a point to post his results first thing in the morning, probably mid-poop.

After a few weeks of this, sufficiently enraged, I resolved to do something about it.

I mean, this cut rate Shakespeare was making me question whether I even deserved to write on Medium any more.

Optimizing My Quordle

So, here is what I did.

Like any good Indian kid, I looked at sample questions… err practice games.

I studied the play strategies of people who obsessively think about this stuff.

I started keeping track of words which had appeared before and had taken a bit of work to figure out.

Eventually, I worked out a plan of action.

1. I needed a set of opening words. Like a chess master, I’d always open each game the same way.
2. I needed to identify the vowels used as early as possible. Since there is no words like aeiou, this would need to be done in the first two words.
3. Cover some of the most common letters as early as possible. The nice thing about Quordle is that it is no spelling bee where they try to trip you with obscure words. They use common words. In addition, you can broadly assume that given a choice between say K and V in BRA_E, they would have picked BRAKE instead of BRAVE since K is more common than V.
4. Find useful words with unique letters which didn’t have vowels just to cover more of the alphabet early.

With these heuristics in place, I set about finding the best three words to open with.

The Three Words

After some trial and error, and some adjustments to muscle memory because, at first, I kept entering one of my words wrong, here are my three starting…