Wordle Postgame Report, November 10

GAMES OF SKILL AND CHANCE DEP'T.

Traditional Buddhist religious painting illustrating bodhisattvas and the heavenly spheres. Buddhism in Mongolia derives much of its recent characteristics from Tibetan Buddhism of the Gelugpa school. Traditionally, Mongols worshiped heaven (the 'clear blue sky') and their ancestors, and they followed ancient northern Asian practices of shamanism, in which human intermediaries went into trance and spoke to and for some of the numberless infinities of spirits responsible for human luck or misfortune. Although the emperors of the Yuan Dynasty in the 14th and 15th century had already converted to Tibetan Buddhism, the Mongols returned to their old shamanist ways after the collapse of their empire. In 1578 Altan Khan, a Mongol military leader with ambitions to UNITE the Mongols and to emulate the career of Chinggis, invited the head of the rising Yellow Sect of Tibetan Buddhism to a summit. They formed an alliance that gave Altan Khan legitimacy and religious sanction for his imperial pretensions and that provided the Buddhist school with protection and patronage. (Photo by: Shang Hsi (fl. 1426-1435)/Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

The Wordle Postgame Report is a brief analysis of a game of Wordle, the five-letter-word guessing game now owned by the New York Times. If you do not play Wordle, Indignity encourages you to please skip this item. The existence of the Wordle Postgame Report does not constitute an endorsement of playing Wordle, not playing Wordle, or of the New York Times.

November 10, UNITE, 6/6

I HAD NEVER really paid attention to my Wordle streak—wins and losses are all part of the Wordle experience—but thanks to the Times' new entry screen that keeps shoving the count in my face, I was aware that it had reached 99. I started with FREAK and got a mundane result, a lone yellow E. Shove it to the side with SWIPE: now it was green, and so was the I. This had the look of a double chute, but I'd already eliminated seven letters, so how long could it go? Especially with that two-box vacancy on the left side, and with S, W, and R all out of the running for consonant pairs? How about OLIVE? No, not OLIVE. How about CHIME? No, not CHIME. Thirteen letters were gone, but now so were four turns. I don't care about the count, but breaking the streak at 99 would be ridiculous; it would force me to have to care about the count. I could try abandoning Hard Mode rules and slapping five new letters down, but the inventory was so low, no words came to mind that would make for a good safety play. The consonant pairs seemed to be exhausted. One more vowel in the mix: GUIDE. The U came up yellow. It was either U _ I _ E or _ _ I U E. UNITE. The five green boxes came together as one. 

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