Weekend Wrap-Up

For Saturday's wordle, I opened with PULSE, which got me a green tile for the E. I knew I needed a second vowel, but did not want to go with an a, so I chose FORCE for my second guess. I got a yellow for the O, so I had two vowels and whole lot of nothing beyond that at this point. I took a while for my third guess but eventually I decided to either guess ADOBE or ABODE. I opted for ABODE because I recently saw The Lion King at the Kennedy Center. So Hakuna Matata. ABODE was nearly the answer! The only letter that wasn't green was the B. So at this point, I just needed to scan my available letters to find the answer and the only thing that made sense was ANODE, which was good for a solve in four.

Sunday, I was decided it would be cool to have a thematic link with my opening guesses for weekend. So PULSE led me to ALIVE for my opening guess Sunday morning. I got a yellow L out of it. For my second guess, I moved the L to the front of the word. I needed a vowel for the second letter when I realized that I only had O and U available to me. I put the O there and then since I had been thinking about the two vowels, LOUSY came to me as a logical guess. I got yellows for the L and Y and a green for the O, which didn't make a lot of sense. To avoid being stumped, I typed XOLXX on my screen. The only two things that I could think of from this setup was YOLKY (which wouldn't work) and YOLO_, which is nothing. So I had no choice but to type XOLYX. Seeing the X's at the front and end of the word must have triggered something inside me because the word POLYP popped in my mind. I hit enter for a solve in three on a puzzle that I'm sure probably broke a few streaks. I'm feeling pretty good about this solve even thought ALIVE is a word that is pretty much the opposite of my early game strategy since it has so many vowels. Sunday it paid off since I was able to use the abundance of vowels to eliminate a bunch of words and lead me to the answer in three guesses.