ON Christmas Eve, my nephew joked, We have alcoholic, non-alcoholic, alcoholic nun, and colic drinks.
Colic as in it makes you cry while drinking. Haha.
And talk of the alcoholic nun, the Blue Nun was one of the two drinks we used to welcome Christmas at midnight.
We played Wordle the Party Game while waiting for the clock to strike 12. Unlike the online version that rejects a word not found in the dictionary, the manual kind needs Google if a player is seriously choosing legit five-letter words.
But my nephew used what he called as brute force: whatever five-letter word came to mind, even if it couldn’t be pronounced and without verifying if it’s in the dictionary.
From brute force to brutally forced. The more unique the word, the funnier the game went.
There were times when I joked that I could write a column or even watch a Netflix series while waiting for the other players to guess the word.
When it was my brain’s turn to be foggier than usual, I’d eat some yummy goodies, hoping all that nutrition could banish the fog to Siberia.
Wordle allows six tries. I was able to get a 2/6, meaning, I got the correct word on the second try. But I also had an X/6, meaning, all my guesses were wrong.
The party version has green and yellow plastic tiles that the host can put on the letters of a player’s guesses. Green means the letter is correct; yellow means it’s one of the letters but in the wrong position for that particular attempt. The online version also uses these colors as clues.
Yes, green and yellow are political colors in Pinas, especially in Cagayan de Oro. But when then presidential candidate Leni Robredo used pink instead of yellow, the latter color was banished to Siberia where I hope my brain fog will also stay.
Instead of The New York Times choosing the five-letter word as what it does to the online version, the party kind gives the host the power to choose the word that the players would guess.
It was only on my nth turn as the host that I noticed the five-letter words at the back of the game’s manual. Oh. It has suggestions. Haha. All this time I relied on my minute brain and if that didn’t work, on Google, to see what difficult five-letter word I could use.
In one of the rounds where I was the host, I chose a word that had a C in it. But somehow I didn’t see the C in the other players’ guesses, and failed to put a yellow tile on it, thus, the guessing game became more difficult for them. Oops. My bad.
Since our surname starts with the letter C, I had absolutely no excuse for that mistake. Sorry po.
This Wordle made us laugh as five-letter words floated above us. No wonder it’s the party version. It’s like Pictionary sans the drawing.
