A studious Wordle player has managed to make six guesses without finding a single correct letter, constituting the perfect failure.
Wordle is a Mastermind-like game where players have to guess a five-letter word. Each time a guess is made, letters are highlighted in yellow if they are in the answer but the wrong space. If a letter is in the correct space, it will become green. Once all five letters are green, you have discovered the word. Though arriving at the correct word can be difficult, there’s a lot of help given along the way – so how hard is it to get the perfect fail?
Dan Becklloyd has answered this question on Twitter. After one particularly bad run, he became interested to see if he could manage a puzzle without a single correct guess. However, this feat would be too simple using Wordle’s easy mode, where the same letters can be repeated in every line. Becklloyd wanted to achieve this feat on hard mode, where all previous correct guesses must be used in subsequent words.
Wordle 251 X/6
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛Yes, this is real. Let me explain. SPOILERS AHEAD/1
— Dan Becklloyd (@DanBecklloyd) February 24, 2022
First, he compiled lists of valid words that could provide as little information as possible, saying, “Another combo is esses, anana, cocco, jugum, phpht, flyby, vizir. Maybe vizir could be a winning word, maybe flyby? But the one I thought was most likely to work was esses, anana, cocco, phpht, flyby, vivid. Vivid is a relatively common word, so a good candidate for a winner.”
The plan to achieve the perfect Wordle fail hinged on one thing: vivid being the correct answer. To make sure that would happen, Becklloyd inspected the webpage’s code and saw it wasn’t too far off. However, the game was sold to The New York Times, which could have spelled disaster for the plan.
Thankfully the words weren’t altered too heavily, and eventually, vivid came up as the correct answer allowing for Becklloyd’s perfect fail.
