The WordleBot just got an upgrade. Now it’s judging your starter words even harder.
NYT’s post-game critic gained a new “skill score” metric this week, separating it from the existing “luck score”. Players are not handling it well. The bot’s opinion of CRANE remains unchanged.
Wordle’s post-game critic just learned new ways to judge your strategy. Photo: Brett Jordan / Unsplash.
The New York Times rolled out a small but psychologically loaded update to WordleBot this week: a new “skill” score that sits next to the existing “luck” score on the post-game analysis page. The numbers go from 0 to 99, the bot is now somehow even more talkative about your decisions, and players — according to a not-very-scientific survey of three different Wordle subreddits — are taking it personally.
The change went live early Tuesday with no announcement. By Tuesday afternoon, the top thread on r/wordle had 4,200 comments. By Tuesday evening, the most-shared screenshot was a player who solved the day’s puzzle in 3 guesses and received a luck score of 92 and a skill score of 14. The reply, posted underneath in 800-point text: “WORDLEBOT, NO.”
What changed
WordleBot has, since its 2022 launch, given two scores: a luck score (how lucky your specific path through the puzzle was) and a skill score (how strategically optimal each guess was). Until this week, those two numbers were derived from the same underlying engine, and the skill score quietly leaned toward favoring guesses that happened to also be lucky.
The new version separates them properly. Skill is now measured purely against the bot’s ideal play, regardless of whether the answer happened to land in your favor. Luck measures, separately, how much of your win you owe to the puzzle being kind that day.
The result, in early data, is that overall skill scores have dropped by an average of 11 points. Most players are getting numbers in the 70s where they used to get 90s. CRANE — the bot’s longtime favorite opening word — still scores best, but second place has shifted from SLATE to TRACE.
Why people are mad
The complaint, which I’ve now seen in three different forms across X, Reddit, and Bluesky, is approximately this: “The bot has always been a little smug, but at least its smugness aligned with my actual performance. Now it’s telling me I won badly.”
This is, statistically, a fair complaint. A 3-guess solve where you guessed the answer on a hunch is now scored very differently from a 3-guess solve where you methodically eliminated possibilities. In the old version both got high marks. In the new version only the second one does. The first gets a respectful 60s skill score and an 85+ luck score, which is the bot’s way of telling you, in a measured tone, that you got away with it.
NYT’s product team, asked about the change in a brief email, framed the update as “clarity rather than judgment.” That phrase has now been turned into a meme on at least three Wordle subreddits.
The starter-word debate is back
Underneath the noise, there’s a more interesting development: the new bot has reignited the long-running argument about which Wordle starter word is mathematically optimal.
For two years, CRANE held the title — not because it’s the most likely answer, but because, in information-theory terms, it provides the most expected information about which letters are present in the day’s puzzle. SLATE was the close runner-up. Together those two words got most of the attention.
The new bot’s rebalanced engine has bumped TRACE into second place, and several careful Wordle players have started running their own simulations against the public Wordle answer list to see what changed. Early results suggest TRACE’s edge is real but small — about a quarter of a guess on average. ADIEU, perennial fan favorite, remains in the lower 80s. ADIEU has never been good. Our deeper guide to opening words goes through the full ranking.
What it actually changes for players
For most players: nothing. Wordle is still a 5-minute morning habit. The bot’s opinion of your performance has zero effect on your streak, your stats, or your enjoyment.
For the small but loud subset of players who care about the bot’s judgment: a lot. Speed-solvers in particular have noticed that strategies optimized for the old bot now score worse. “I’ve been playing the bot, not the puzzle, for a year,” one user posted on r/NYTGames. “I now have to play the puzzle again. This is technically fine and emotionally a betrayal.”
The Times, for its part, is unlikely to care. Wordle remains the company’s biggest games product by daily user count. The bot is, ultimately, a small UX feature on the post-game screen. Most players, after a week of grumbling, will probably stop checking it.
Until then: TRACE.
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