The PopCulteer
MAY 23, 2025

So…it turns out I got something in common with the new Pope.

It’s not the Catholic thing. I was never serious about that. And it’s not the Chicago thing. He is from there, and Mel and I like to go there a lot (in fact, in a couple of weeks I may be blogging from there for a few days).

It’s not that we both have a collection of cool hats and lots of fancy shirts from Temu. It’s not that we both collect action figures (I don’t actually know if he does, but I collect enough for both of us).

Nope, that’s not it. The thing I have in common with the newly-minted Pope Leo XiV is that we both play Wordle.

You know Wordle. It’s the game where you get six chances to guess a five-letter word. The New York Times owns it now.

I’ve never mentioned it here in the blog because, well, it always annoyed me when folks would post their daily Wordle score on social media. I thought it was a little performative and got a wee bit obnoxious after a while.

But I did start to play it during the pandemic. And I got pretty good at it.

Weirdly good, in fact. More often than not I can solve it in two steps. I do this by choosing a different starting word every day, and by being pretty lucky.

About 900 days ago, with a 98% success rate, I did that thing where you register and sync your Wordle stats with your NY Times subscription so you can keep your streak going, if if you’re using a different device. Before I did that, I barely paid attention to my stats.

Worldle was just something I did at the start of the day as part of my ritual to get the brain started. But when I synced up my stats, something interesting happened.

First of all, it re-set my stats to zero, which was no big deal. I’d never shared my score or stats anyway.

Second, however, it also gave me the ability to keep a streak going. I hadn’t really tried to do that before because I couldn’t transfer my stats from my office PC, so it’d break the streak every time Mel and I went on a trip, or if I even just got too busy to Wordle once in a while.

At that point (after I realized that you need to do Wordle EVERY DAY when my first streak broke at five), I decided to keep track of how many days in a row I could solve the puzzle.

Then, in March of last year, for reasons I have still not figured out, my streak was snapped after 448 days.

I didn’t lose, and I didn’t miss a day. They just started my streak over at 1, with no warning. A check of very angry Reddit users showed that this happened to a few thousand people that same weekend, but nothing was ever done about it.

I was about as angry as a person can get when the fairly meaningless stats for a game, that they get to play for free and don’t discuss with anybody else, are messed up can get…which is to say, not much, really.

I also play the unofficial variants on the game, Dordle and Octordle, which are more challenging and more fun and require different strategies. These three games are part of my morning routine where I wake up, have breakfast and flex my brain a tiny bit while procrastinating about beginning work for the day.

If a streak snaps, it might bother me for about ten seconds before I move on. My current Dordle streak is over two hundred days, and I don’t keep track of any streaks at Octordle because you have to navigate to a special page to see them and I don’t care enough to do that

Back to Wordle, I was a bit intrigued by the phantom snapping of my streak, and I was wondering if it would happen again when I hit the same number of days. After solving Thursday’s puzzle in two steps again, I looked at my numbers, and realized that I’ve hit a couple of  milestones since my re-set.

By the time you read this, I also should have tied my longest streak. Saturday I’ll find out if I beat it, or if it starts over again.

But I won’t bother writing about it here again. I still find the whole Wordle stat sharing thing to be a little obnoxious. Still…for one time only, here goes…

The score box for Wordle shows 900 games played, 100% wins, a current streak of 447 snf s maximum streak of 448. It also shows that 500 games were solved in two steps.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. I hope the headline wasn’t too clickbait-y. Check back every day for fresh content and all our regular features.