6
ooGYo
YooGo
GGGGo
GGGGo
YoooY
GGGGG
Six words fit today’s puzzle once you get to GGGG: SCARE, SCARF, SCARP, SCARS, SCART, and SCARY.
Going into the third guess, we see that _ _ AR_ were known. Knowing only two (possibly three) letters, we are more likely to gather information rather than trying to solve the puzzle on guess three. So, the guess was likely SCARP or SCART because we want to know, by guess four, if common letters like S, T, OR P are part of the solution. While obscure words like these are not likely in the Wordle solution set, wordle accepts guesses from a longer list of words.
Wordle only uses plurals like GEESE or FUNGI, but it will never be FOXES or SPOTS, so after guess three, we are left with four possible solutions, but only three guesses remain. Five, if you didn’t know about the plurals, which I only assumed – until I googled it just now.
With guess four, you likely take a random guess hoping for a decent day (par 4).
Having guessed incorrectly on our fourth guess, we just try to avoid failure. This is why I don’t play ‘hard mode’; from here, you must rely solely upon luck and cannot employ logic.
On guess five, faced with more options than remaining guesses, and depending upon your assumptions about the wordle solution set, you might choose a word that contains three letters from the set of possible solutions, {E, F, P, T, S, Y}, excluding those you have already guessed.
By guess six, the solution to the puzzle is known with no chance of failure.