One thing that occurred to me during yesterday's solve that I didn't include in my post was that PRISM would be a good opening guess. It's got a good mix of common letters, and I is good vowel to get out of the way early since its probably the 3rd most common vowel. I even wanted to use it as my second guess yesterday, but couldn't/wouldn't since SHALT was my first guess. So I used it today and got a green tiles for P.
So now I was working my way through the P section of the dictionary. I figured it would be good to get the most common vowels out of the way. I thought about PHASE, but it had an S, so it was out. From there, I saw "please" but since that is too long to be a guess, it led me to PLEAD for guess number 2. I got another green for L. I laughed at the idea of trying to get each successive green letter on each guess, but that sounds like something that would be impossible to pull off.
I knew, or at least felt super strongly, that the third letter was the vowel. The first word to come to mind was PLOTS. I considered it, but it had two strikes against it. I reasoned that PLOTS as a noun is probably not in the word bank, but PLOTS as a verb could be. But I wasn't certain. In any case, there's an S, which isn't in today's answer. I swapped the O for a U and came up with PLUME, but has an E. I deleted the last two letters and looked at the N next to M and arrived at PLUNK for a solve in three that extended my streak to 62.
PS - I tried to figure out if the descending steps of green letters could work, and it looks like it would've died at guess four. It also would've required taking a dive on guess three. I'll keep an eye out to see if we find a puzzle that doing it would work for. Or maybe I won't. I dunno. But this is definitely something that can probably only be done by reverse engineering/dumb luck.
PXXXX - PRISM
PLXXX - PLEAD
PLUXX - PLUME
PLUNX - PLUN?
PLUNK - PLUNK
No comments:
Post a Comment