Mathematics of the NYT daily word game Waffle

This note investigates the combinatorics of permutations underlying the NYT daily word game Waffle. It helps to solve Waffle games and helps to understand why some games are easy to solve while others are very hard. It shows that a perfect unscrambling must have precisely 11 orbits, with at least one of length 1, on the 21 Waffle squares. It also describes practical algorithms for solving Waffle games and creating new games with extreme properties.