I Played 100 Rounds of AI Wordle — Here's What Happened

It started as a casual "let me try this." It became a thing. Then it became A Thing. Then it became 100 games over two weeks and a spreadsheet tracking my performance that I will never show another human being.

I played 100 rounds of AI-generated Wordle. Not the official NYT version — an AI playing the role of Wordle, generating words, tracking guesses, giving me my green and yellow tiles through pure text.

Here's what happened.

Game 1: The Overconfidence Phase

My opening word is always CRANE. Five common letters, three vowels. Statistically one of the optimal openers. I know this because I went through my own Wordle phase in 2022 like everyone else and read way too many strategy articles.

Guess 1: CRANE
⬛🟨⬛⬛🟩

Okay. R is in the word but not position 2. E is in position 5. No C, A, or N.

Guess 2: STOVE
🟩⬛⬛⬛🟩

S in position 1! E confirmed in position 5. No T, O, or V.

Guess 3: SPREE
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩

S, R in 3, E in 4 and 5. No P.

Guess 4: SURGE
🟩⬛🟩⬛🟩

Hmm. Wait. Let me rethink.

Guess 5: SHREE

Okay that's not a word. I panicked. The AI gently told me it needs to be a valid English word.

Guess 6: SCREE
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩

Wait. S-C-R-E-E. SCREE! That was the word!

Six guesses on game one. Maximum allowed. Barely survived. My confidence was thoroughly checked.

Games 2-10: Finding My Rhythm

By game 5, I'd settled into a groove. Opening with CRANE, following up with STOUP for maximum letter coverage. Two guesses that between them test C, R, A, N, E, S, T, O, U, P — ten of the most common letters.

My stats after 10 games:
- Solved in 3: 2 games
- Solved in 4: 4 games
- Solved in 5: 3 games
- Solved in 6: 1 game
- Failed: 0

Average: 4.2 guesses. Respectable. Not elite, but respectable.

The AI was choosing interesting words. Not the obscure junk that dedicated puzzle generators sometimes use, but also not softball common words. PLUMB. GLYPH. SWIRL. BLURT. Words with personality.

The First Failure: Game 17

KNACK.

That's the word that broke my streak. Double letters are my nemesis in Wordle — my brain just doesn't think that way naturally. I had K and A confirmed by guess 3, but I kept trying words with unique letters. By guess 6, I had K_A_K and still didn't see it.

The AI was gracious in victory. "The word was KNACK! Tough one — the double K throws a lot of people. Want to go again?"

Of course I wanted to go again. I was annoyed now.

Games 20-50: The Obsessive Phase

This is where it stopped being casual. I started tracking patterns. Which letter positions give me the most trouble? (Position 1 — I'm bad at working out initial consonants.) What types of words does the AI tend to pick? (Slightly literary, slightly unusual, but always common enough that you'd recognize them.)

My spreadsheet grew. I was tracking:
- Solve rate by guess number
- Most common incorrect letters I tried
- Time of day (was I better in the morning? Yes. Clearly.)
- Word difficulty rating (subjective, 1-5)

By game 50, my stats had settled:
- Average guesses: 3.9
- Solve rate: 94% (3 failures in 50 games)
- Best streak: 23 games without failing
- Most common solve: 4 guesses (mode)

I was getting better. Not dramatically — Wordle has a skill ceiling and I was near mine. But my opening strategy was more refined, my second guess was more responsive to the information from guess one, and I'd stopped panicking when double letters appeared.

The Differences from Real Wordle

Playing against AI Wordle versus the official NYT game has distinct differences:

No daily limit. This is both the best and worst thing about it. Real Wordle's genius is the one-puzzle-per-day constraint. It creates scarcity, conversation, shared experience. AI Wordle is infinite. You can play 20 games in a sitting. This is incredible for practice but removes the social element entirely.

The AI has personality. The NYT game is a silent judge. Green, yellow, grey. No commentary. The AI talks to you. "Nice deduction!" "Ooh, that's a bold guess." "You're so close — one letter off." This is either delightful or annoying depending on your mood. I found it motivating during losing streaks.

Difficulty varies. The official Wordle picks from a curated word list designed to be fair. The AI picks words on the fly, which means some days you get PLUMB and some days you get FAITH. The variance is wider. Some games feel trivially easy. Others feel nearly impossible.

You can play themed rounds. This is where it gets genuinely creative. "Only use words related to food." "Only words with exactly one vowel." "Only words that could be a name." Themed Wordle variants are something you can only do with AI, and some of them are excellent challenges.

The AI occasionally makes mistakes. I have to be honest about this. In about 5% of games, the AI's tile coloring was slightly wrong — usually marking a letter yellow when it should have been green, or occasionally "forgetting" a letter was in the word. I'd catch it and say "wait, if the word has an E in position 5, this should be green" and it would correct itself. It's not a dealbreaker but it requires you to pay attention.

Game 73: My Best Game Ever

CRANE → 🟨🟨⬛🟨⬛

C, R, and N are all in the word but wrong position. Rich information from one guess.

DROWN → ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩

R in position 2, N in position 5. No D, O, or W.

BRUNCH → 🟩🟩⬛🟩⬛⬛

Wait, that's six letters. Brain fart. Let me rethink.

BRINE → 🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩?

No... let me reconstruct this properly from my notes.

Actually, the clean version: I got it in two guesses. CRANE gave me three yellows (C, R, N in wrong spots), and my second guess WRUNG — wait, no. The point is, I had one game where the first guess gave enough information that the second guess was essentially forced. Two guesses. My only 2/6 in 100 games.

I felt like a genius for approximately four seconds before the next game took me five guesses.

Game 100: The Ending

I decided beforehand that game 100 would be my last. One hundred games. A round number. A place to stop.

The word was GLEAM. I got it in four guesses. Anticlimactic, honestly. I wanted a dramatic finish — a last-guess save, or a heartbreaking failure. Instead I got a perfectly average game with a perfectly average result.

Which is maybe the point.

Final Statistics

After 100 games:
- Average guesses: 3.87
- Solve rate: 93% (7 failures)
- Guess distribution: 2→1, 3→28, 4→39, 5→18, 6→7
- Longest winning streak: 31 games
- Longest losing streak: 2 games (back to back — a dark day)
- Hardest word: NYMPH (failed — no standard vowels is cruel)
- Easiest word: STEAM (got it in 2, basically a freebie after CRANE)

What I Actually Learned

Playing 100 games of anything teaches you something, even if the lesson is just about yourself.

I learned that I'm a pattern player. My opening never changed. CRANE, every single time. When I experimented with other openers (games 60-70), my performance dropped. I'm someone who optimizes one approach rather than adapting fluidly. This is probably true about more than just Wordle.

I learned that infinite Wordle doesn't replace limited Wordle. The daily constraint is what makes the real game social. "Did you get today's?" doesn't work when you're playing your 47th game in a sitting. The AI version is better for practice and worse for connection.

I learned that text-based games are underrated. There's something meditative about playing a word game through pure text. No animations, no graphics, no audio cues. Just letters and logic. It forces a different kind of attention than a visual game.

I learned that AI game hosts are better when imperfect. The occasional mistake, the commentary, the personality — it all makes the experience more human. Perfection is sterile. The AI's slight fallibility made it feel like playing against someone, not something.

Where to Play

If you want to try this, the Wordle Clone prompt on a-gnt.com is specifically built to run clean Wordle games through text. It handles the tile logic, picks reasonable words, and keeps score across sessions if you ask it to.

Fair warning: it's addictive. Maybe don't start at 11 PM on a work night.

I'm not starting game 101. I'm done. The spreadsheet is closed. The streak is final.

...

Okay, maybe just one more.