Live: an even more challenging Wordle answer #270, March 16

Hot off the challenge of puzzle #265, which saw hundreds of players losing their winning streak, the latest Wordle is another problem that could end your run of success. Honestly, who would have thought ‘Watch’ would be the end of so many of us?

Before reading on, clearly, this live blog is going to contain spoilers for Wordle puzzle #270, the challenge for March 16. If you want to go into today’s problem clean then you should head over to Wordle now and give it a go. If you want a hint (or the solution - no judgment here) then we’ve written a guide to today’s Wordle answer with a couple of hints so you don’t have to miss out on all the fun.

Of course, if you’d like some more general strategies for taking on today’s problem, I’d suggest taking a look at the best starting words for Wordle. It’s not just a list of handy suggestions, we look into the tactics of codebreakers and linguistic theorists to come up with the perfect first word for Wordle.

(Image credit: New York Times)

Okay, onto today’s puzzle. After last week’s Wordle caused complaints, you’d think the New York Times might avoid choosing a word with so many possible variables. With March 11’s puzzle, you could land on the ‘_atch’ part of the solution quickly and run through six perfectly reasonable variations of the answer without landing on the correct solution. ‘latch’, ‘patch’, ‘catch’, ‘match’, ‘natch’, and ‘batch’ would all seem like good answers and they would have got you no nearer to a winning answer. 

Of course, what made it more frustrating for anyone who lost their winning streak on March 11 was that the correct answer - ‘watch’ - could escape your thinking because it had a different phonetic sound. You could lock in on the ‘atch’ sound and entirely miss the ‘otch’ possibilities.

Today’s answer, if anything, is more frustrating because if you’d tried to learn the lesson of last week’s puzzle you’ll have been led astray. If you’d landed on the ‘_ater’ ending of the word and entered ‘later’, ‘hater’, ‘rater’, you may have taken a step back, thought of last week and tried ‘water’. Aiming for that different-sounding version of the same letters. You might, like me, have thought yourself pretty smart when you pressed enter. And, like me, sworn when it was another failure.

If Wordle has a lesson to teach us it is to remain humble.