It seems a lot of us ended up with “SPIRE” as our second to last guess, hehe. A friend of mine who goes by “Ringwraith” online was very disappointed in himself for taking six guesses to get to the answer.
My gut was to go with that as my second guess, but like many of you didn’t think that word likely made the list and figured “spire” was more likely. But lo and behold!
THANE
WHILE
CHIDE
SHIRE
Kicking myself because I thought of SHIRE on row 3, but thought it was too British a word to be the answer. Maybe it’s Wordle making amends for FAVOR.
SPORE - PRONG - PROUD
Took me a while to even find another word with those three starting letters. I guess I was lucky to have eliminated so many possibilities with the incorrect letters in my initial few guesses.
ASIDE
FRONT
GROUP
PROWL
PROMO
PROXY
I am not good at guessing which words might or might not get used. After guess 3, I was aware of at least these three possibilities, but figures only the first two could conceivably be used.
I’m not really sure what the best strategy is. I go for a starting word with the most common vowels / consonants; approaching it like breaking a simple cipher. On the one hand, that means that any unusual words are going to take 4 guesses to get. On the other, most words are going to take 4 guesses to get! I’ve had 1 @ 5, 1 @ 3, the rest all 4.
I think it’s more fun to play if you don’t try to have a “best strategy”. I’d guess that something like RATIO is an “optimal” starting word (3 vowels, 2 1-point scrabble consonants), but I find it more fun to start from somewhere as random as possible so that each day is a doubly-different puzzle (random start AND end!)