Do you play word games? Do you usually solve them?

The past couple of years I have done Wordle almost daily. My daughter first discovered it and soon the game became a matter of friendly family competition to see which of us was better at solving the daily puzzle. (For the record, we usually took the same number of turns with wildly different guesses.)

She also encouraged me to expand to other languages. She does the French version, Le Mot, most days. I do too, though half my guesses are in German. (I tried the German version of the game, but for some reason. It didn’t grab me. Maybe because I don’t know anyone else who plays it. Part of the fun is comparing your guesses with others.)

My French vocabulary isn’t as good as my English, but I have a 95 per cent success rate in Le Mot – not much less than my 98 per cent in Wordle. Though last week I hit one that was unsolvable.

At this point, puzzle aficionados will tell me there’s no such thing. Just because I may not be able to solve the puzzle doesn’t mean others can’t.

So I took a screen shot to prove my point. As you probably know, a green square means you have the right letter in the right spot. A brown one means the right letter in the wrong position.

Look at my first guess. You don’t need to know any French to see how my mind was working  my choices were based on having three letters correct on that first guess, one in exactly the right place. Solving the puzzle should have been easy.

Except my second guess, where I tried to eliminate a few letters, came up completely blank. Even though I used one of the letters already established as being in the word. Did that make sense?

By the fourth guess I was totally confused. The letter C was in the word on the first guess, but not on subsequent guesses. How could I be expected to solve the puzzle?

Turns out the word was bovin. Two of the correct  letters in my first guess weren’t part of the word. The third one was in a different location. No wonder I gave up.

I’ve never had this happen before. Have you? And who do I contact to complain that this shouldn’t count as a loss in my statistics?

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