Wordle is a simple game in many respects. The vast majority of users play using the default settings, where you can guess any letter on any turn.
But a smaller slice of players (you may be one) choose to play in “hard mode,” which adds a major constraint: Any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses. If letters turn yellow and green, you are forced to use them in your next guess.
So you might think that hard mode is harder — it says so in the name.
But as Wordle turns 5 years old Friday, an analysis of 730 million games from the last year says the opposite: Players in hard mode solve in fewer turns on average.
Talk about a puzzle.
In standard mode, you have more freedom to test other letters. In particular, you have a much better opportunity to extricate yourself from traps — like having BATCH, CATCH, LATCH, MATCH and PATCH remaining — and avoid crashing out. (In hard mode, once ATCH turns green, you’re forced to end each additional guess with ATCH.)
Yet the data reveals another surprise: Those in hard mode have a lower rate of failing to solve in six turns.
So what’s going on?
Hard mode seems to help players avoid poor choices; for one thing, you’re prevented from straying from revealed clues. But the constraints are more like guardrails than handcuffs. Standard-mode players have more freedom but often don’t know how to use it. Not needing to use revealed letters, they have many more choices on their second and third turns.
David Epstein, author of “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better,” said in an interview that in any area of life, “when options are really large” there’s a tendency to “back out of a decision or make a poor one.”
Citing the cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, he said the brain is mostly not for thinking, but for preventing you from thinking. “It’s wired for convenience, the easy thing, the first thing to pop to mind,” he said, while constraints can paradoxically lead to creativity and productivity.
Hard-mode players are more likely to be focused and persistent to find a word that fits the constraints. In standard mode, people might play quickly and carelessly, said Mike Moran, a co-founder of the statistical site Wordle Tools and a hard-mode enthusiast.
Many players use a preset pair of vowel-filled opening words like RAISE and POUTY, he said, but “trying to knock out all six vowels in the first two guesses” no matter what happens after the first guess is not sound strategy (85 percent of Wordle solutions have one or two vowels).
The biggest disparities between modes come on days when there are double consonants and double vowels, like two L’s and two E’s, Mr. Moran said. Our data confirms this: When ASSAY was a solution, hard-mode players solved it almost half a step faster on average. And when EERIE was a solution, only 5 percent of hard-mode players crashed out, while 12 percent of standard-mode players did.
For words like ASSAY, hard-mode players are stuck with any unusual letter patterns they’ve already found, and have to make it work. Standard-mode players “keep throwing out new letters, fishing for something that often isn’t going to be there,” said Mr. Moran, who goes by Mike, Virginia M² as a commenter on The New York Times’s daily Wordle Review.
Is it just a selection effect?
One hypothesis for better results in hard mode is that it attracts a select group, one that’s more serious and skillful.
Only 11 percent of Wordle players use hard mode, so they are select in that sense. They have taken the trouble to go to Wordle settings (a gear icon at top right) and toggle to hard mode. They have also taken the trouble to know that hard mode even exists.
Hard-mode players are less likely to use inefficient vowel-filled starter words like ADIEU and AUDIO. (Wordle Bot, programmed to solve Wordles in as few steps as possible on average, has used only one vowel per word in its two most recent preferred hard-mode starter words: CLASP and TARPS. You may notice the P in both; it’s a good trap breaker because it’s the first letter in several challenging rhyming patterns.)
This all suggests the possibility of a selection effect, and the data supports a small one. The evidence mainly suggests that hard mode is simply a more successful play style for most players.
Perhaps surprisingly, 68 percent of those in standard mode play in hard-mode style already, following hard mode’s constraints even though they don’t have to. (They may not know about the official setting, or about the freedom in standard mode.) Whatever the reason, they achieve the exact same average score (4.1 guesses) as those who officially toggle the hard mode setting on. Compare that with an average score of 4.6 among standard-mode players who don’t follow the hard-mode constraints.
A selection effect does seem to show up in avoiding elimination: Those officially in hard mode crash out less often (a 2.5 percent failure rate) than those unofficially following hard-mode rules (3.2 percent failure rate).
But players who choose hard mode have an escape hatch: You’re allowed to start in hard mode and switch to standard mode during a game — if you sense a trap, for instance. We found roughly 0.2 percent of those in hard mode toggled it off midgame during a recent 30-day period.
What about the bot?
In contrast to its human counterparts, Wordle Bot has a harder time in hard mode, solving in 3.6 turns on average versus 3.5 in standard mode. Wordle Bot has never crashed out in standard mode, but it fails to solve in hard mode roughly once every 300 games.
At the highest of levels, then, standard mode is easier in terms of results. Although it’s very challenging for a human to emulate the bot’s play, our data shows that the top 3 percent of standard-mode players outperform the top 3 percent of hard-mode players. It’s a rare case of players “maximizing the true potential of what standard mode allows for,” Mr. Moran said.
There’s one area where average standard-mode players could clearly improve. As the chart below shows, there’s an elegant solution to a rhyming trap like the one we mentioned above:
Hard-mode players don’t have the luxury of playing a winnowing word like BLIMP. Instead, the best players go to great lengths to avoid rhyming traps. “You familiarize yourself with many of the most common ones,” Mr. Moran said. “I value my streak.”
In that sense, hard mode still takes a lot of hard work. And as the data shows, the results generally follow.
