Automating a Weekly Wordle Competition: How to Crowdsource Your Wordle Scores

Wordle has taken the world by storm. The simple yet addictive word game has everyone from grade schoolers to grandparents hooked as they try to guess the daily five-letter word in six tries or less.

Part of Wordle’s appeal is getting to share those green, yellow, and gray squares after you’ve solved the puzzle. And let’s admit it, not-so-subtly bragging about solving it in three guesses also feels great.

My friends, family members and I started sharing our Wordle results on a daily basis. But it was getting hard to keep track of who had the best scores. I decided the ultimate way to up the competition would be to automate the collection of everyone‘s daily Wordle results so we could see who was the ultimate Wordle whiz each week.

The Basics: How to Build a Weekly Wordle Leaderboard

Here‘s an overview of how I automated the Wordle competition:

• Competitors email their Wordle results to a unique email address every time they finish the daily puzzle.
• An automation tool called Zapier parses the emailed Wordle results to extract key info like name, score, number of guesses, etc.
• Zapier automatically logs this data into a shared Google Sheet that tallies up weekly stats to power the leaderboard.

I’ll outline all the details of setting this automation process up step-by-step. But first let‘s cover how to customize and interpret the leaderboard itself to make it ready for a little friendly competition.

Breaking Down the Weekly Wordle Leaderboard Metrics

The leaderboard ranks players from top to bottom based on who did the "best" that week. But how do you define best when it comes to Wordle?

There are a few key stats I’m tracking for bragging rights:

• Overall win %: The % of daily Wordle puzzles solved.
• Fewest average guesses: Who is able to get the answer fastest?
• Most 3 or 4 guess wins: Tracking how many times players can solve under par.
• Longest streak: Who can keep their Wordle hot streak alive?
• Head-to-head wins: Direct comparison with friends for outright bragging rights.

Those key metrics paint a full picture of Wordle prowess. Next I‘ll explain how to use Zapier and Google Sheets together to easily collect and organize everyone‘s daily scores to populate the leaderboard.

Step 1: Connect an Email Parser in Zapier

The first step is connecting Zapier to Email Parser by Zapier. This tool allows us to create a dedicated email address that will trigger automatic parsing and processing of Wordle results.

When you connect your Email Parser account, Zapier automatically generates a unique email address:

[email protected]

Have all competitors send their daily Wordle results to that address after completing each puzzle. Any email received will kick off the automation workflow.

Now we need to train the parser what data to pull from the emails.

Step 2: Train the Email Parser What Content to Extract

When your competitors email their Wordle scores, the body of the email will contain data like name, number of guesses, a summary of the puzzle solution, and potentially the Wordle grid itself.

We need to teach the parser what content blocks to target and label them appropriately:

Do this by sending a few test Wordle result emails from different players. Then highlight the key data components in the parser and label them:

• Name
• Number of Guesses
• Hard Mode?
• Wordle Solution String

Tag any additional data as “Puzzle Grid” so the parser knows what can be excluded.

Once you tag a few examples, Zapier will learn what to extract from every email automatically using natural language processing algorithms underneath.

Step 3: Set Up a Google Sheet Template for the Leaderboard

Now we need somewhere to send all that extracted Wordle data. The perfect place to compile results over time into a leaderboard is Google Sheets.

I created a Sheet template you can duplicate to get started quickly.

The Sheet contains:

• Results Table: New row added for every parsed email.
• Players Tabs: Daily results split by player for personal stats.
• Leaderboard Tab: Weekly ranking calculated from key metrics.
• Formulas: Built-in calculations update scores automatically.

Feel free to customize and expand on it as you set up your friendly rivalry!

Step 4: Create Zapier Workflow to Parse Emails into Sheet

The last step is setting up the automation in Zapier that will parse data from incoming emails with Wordle results and populate them into the Google Sheet template.

The workflow is simple:

Trigger: New Email to Parser Address
Action: Create Spreadsheet Row

On the action defining each parsed field from emails, map it to the corresponding column in the results table of the Sheet:

• Name → Player
• Number of Guesses → Guesses
• Hard Mode? → Hard Mode
• Wordle Solution → Solution

And voila! Your automated Wordle competition is ready to roll. As soon as results start coming into the parser email address, your Sheet will populate with data to power the leaderboard!

How Players Can Submit Wordle Results

Once your automation is set up, here is what your fellow competitors need to do to get their daily Wordle results included:

1. Complete the day‘s Wordle puzzle as normal at www.nytimes.com/games/wordle.
2. Click the “Share” button to copy their results.
3. Paste results into an email to the parser address you created earlier.

The body of the email will contain their name, number of guesses, whether they had Hard Mode enabled, and the full solution string:

As emails hit your parser inbox, Zapier will automatically parse and log all this metadata into the shared Google Sheet.

And now the competition begins! Players can visit the Sheet to monitor the weekly leaderboard and trash talk their friends as they vie for Wordle domination.

Customizing Your Wordle Competition

While what I’ve outlined gets a fully automated weekly leaderboard running, there is ample room for customization and expanding the competitive factors tracked over time.

Here are just a few ideas for extra stats or competition twists to implement:

• Track longest single guess streak (all 5+ letter words)
• Assign scoring system for speed
• Bonus points for hardest Wordle solutions solved
• Identify which words trip up players the most
• Compare classic vs. hard mode performance
• Highlight unlikely comeback wins
• Call out daily faceplants (6 guess fails)
• Give awards for extremes like most vowels used
• Create user profanity counters for rage measuring

And those just scratch the surface of potential creative competition mechanics!

As the collector of the data, you could even run some interesting analysis in Python or R around player statistics. Some quick exploratory analysis yielded these unique insights around my group‘s strategies:

Comparison of Players‘ Guess Distribution

The above breakdown shows how many guesses it takes on average per player to solve Wordle puzzles. It allows calling out in hindsight who may have had "luckier" games skewing their averages versus those grinding out more methodical victories.

Observing trends in how many tries it takes before getting that final green square can illuminate strengths, weaknesses, and styles between players. Data is power!

Optimal First Guess Analysis

Another angle is determining if certain friends have "better" instincts on their ideal starting words. Leveraging the wealth of Wordle guess data collected in the Sheet, we could build a logistic regression model predicting probability of success for thousands of different opening guesses.

As evidenced above, even amongst the most popular first guesses, large disparities exist in historical win rates. The data allows us to determine with statistical confidence the optimal initial words contenders should open with for a competitive advantage.

Of course, hardcore players could take this analysis to the next level by…

Simulating Hundreds of Wordle Timelines

With all historical games logged, it also becomes possible to retroactively simulate how a given player might have performed across thousands of past Wordle puzzles.

This allows determining personal best and worst case scenarios had the luck of the draw played out differently for you on day one of your streak.

Here is one potential Monte Carlo approach to simulating hypothetical timelines:

1. Create a player profile based on historical vocabulary, common guesses, median solve rates, etc. to reflect someone‘s general skill.
2. Randomly sample a past Wordle date to establish the puzzle for that simulation.
3. Algorithmically play out a game turn-by-turn based on that player‘s profile against the actual solution.
4. Repeat for 10,000+ iterations to produce a distribution of results.

Running these simulations for myself and my competitors could produce outputs as seen below illustrating volatility in our potential fortunes compared to reality:

The dotted line represents my actual performance over time, but the colored bands show the wide range of outcomes plausible based on the simulation inputs. This gives a nuanced perspective accounting for the luck factor.

The simulations could also compute the exact probability of extremely rare events like:

• Odds of 100+ game win streak
• Chances of finishing dead last
• Likelihood of losing to a 4 year old 😂

So in closing, the sketched out analysis here is just a taste of the creative data science approaches you could use to enhance your friendly Wordle rivalry! The daily firehose of rich game data opens up endless possibilities.

In Closing

I hope walking through how I automated a weekly Wordle competition inspires you to do the same with your family and friends. The simple Zapier workflow saves tons of manual effort while making the rivalry around the beloved word guessing game even more fun!

And naturally, be sure to implement good sportsmanship ground rules around the trash talk. The last thing you’d want is for Wordle to actually cost you a friendship! But a bit of data-driven banter will surely liven up the group chat.

Let me know about any creative competition customizations or analytics ideas you come up with! I‘m always looking to up my data science game around America‘s new favorite pastime.

Happy competing!