Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

https://dontwordle.com/

by dontwordle • 4 years ago

676 236 4 years ago

dontwordle.com

ar_lan4• 4 years ago

Absolutely - when they choose ridiculous words like "PATCH".

WATCH HATCH BATCH CATCH LATCH MATCH

There, I made 6 near-perfect guesses that would have cost me the game if I started with any one of them.

This is so infuriating. I've lost I think 3 times already because of this type of word choice.

Note: This is only relevant if you play on the hard-mode, which enforces you re-use guessed letters that have already been signaled as correct.

zwieback3• 4 years ago

Yeah, those are the worst ones. Rare, though, for me. Maybe ran into this a couple times and cost me my only loss so far.

Dylan16807• 4 years ago

Wordle is simply not meant to be played on hard mode.

andrewflnr4• 4 years ago

Yes, very silly to deliberately choose the mode that makes those words nigh impossible to guess, and then blame the word choice. If you want to make the game harder, try to bring down your guess count.

function_seven2• 4 years ago

Oh those are the worst. There should be a term for that early success curse when playing it on Hard Mode. Getting a bunch of greens right off the bat can be a kiss of death.

andrewflnr4• 4 years ago

I've heard "canyon of doom".

ghaff11• 4 years ago

Today was actually a fairly bad one for that.

Even if you don't play hard mode it can be difficult to eliminate even 3 less common letters or so in one shot.

filmgirlcw• 4 years ago

Yeah, I could have had today’s in two but it took me four moves because of the options with the third letter.

benatkin• 4 years ago

Usually I can solve a Wordle in a few minutes, but sometimes it takes a really long time, like 20 minutes if I don't give up. Two days ago I started playing during the last few minutes of the NBA game and didn't get the right answer until after the game was over. It took me 20 minutes and in the process I entered a word I didn't know about but that was in the dictionary. The correct word was a word I knew about but that was quite different from other words, including the one I guessed just by iterating through possible words.

I still got it though. Those ones that rhyme with other words, especially if I blow through some of my guesses before finding most of the letters, are quick to answer but are typically the ones where I lose.

dhosek• 4 years ago

I think that it’s within appropriate etiquette if you reveal a past answer. I remember learning a couple new words on the way to VOUCH from _OUCH (MOUCH and LOUCH to be precise).

sateesh• 4 years ago

Along with these ones that are hard for me to get right are when the letters are repeated.

ghaff11• 4 years ago

Repeated letters are one of the things that tend to get me. Others are:

- Uncommon letters (I tend to mentally skip over them because they're uncommon.)

- Words that differ from the "usual" pronunciation for a pattern, like having a glottal stop. When I'm pronouncing some pattern mentally in the usual way I can end up skipping past a valid word because I'm mentally pronouncing it wrong.

NikolaNovak• 4 years ago

While I agree with the spirit of your message, I feel you're addressing the title without actually having clicked it ;)

lowkey_• 4 years ago

If the objective is to simply win rather than to win in the fewest number of tries, it can be valuable to spend a guess on exploring the problem space rather than guessing the word outright:

Once you know every letter is correct except the W after the first guess, you can think of the missing letter in the possible correct words (HBCLMP), and put together a word like "CHOMP" to eliminate a lot of potential guesses.

dwringer• 4 years ago

This is the most interesting aspect of Wordle to me, and the fact that hard-mode pretty much breaks it along with leading to random no-win situations basically ruined Wordle for me. Sure, I can just play it without hard mode - but then my friends and I aren't playing the same game.

jquery• 4 years ago

Seems like you need to avoid guesses that can get you trapped like that, and therein lies the extra difficulty, no?

testplzignore• 4 years ago

That's part of the fun! My current strategy is to never use "H" in my letter-elimination guesses, and never use "E" if I've already matched "S" and "A". I learned my lesson after winning on a 50/50 guess on one of the SHA_E days.

DonaldFisk• 4 years ago

I've stopped playing Wordle, after I missed it twice. My strategy was to use up letters of the alphabet in rough order of frequency: STONE, LAIRD, CHUMP, GAWKY, but occasionally varying the choice of the next word when I could think of a better one.

If the word was PATCH, like most other times I would have played

    S(T)ONE

    L[A]IRD

    (C)(H)UM(P)

after which PATCH is obvious. If you hadn't played that strategy, but you knew it was ?ATCH, you should divide up the candidate initial letters P, W, H, B, C, L, M: e.g. BLAME, CLAMP (neither of these is possible, but you would gain information). CLAMP would have confirmed it was PATCH. If neither word helped, you would at least know the unknown letter is W or H: two more guesses at worst.

I did once fail to guess after six tries. The word was FOYER.

The new game looks interesting, and the strategy winning (failing to choose the word) is less obvious.

ar_lan4• 4 years ago

This strategy doesn't work on hard mode, which is the main problem. I think it is essentially a separate game.

zwieback3• 4 years ago

Fun, clever and hard! Failed miserably first attempt.

ghaff11• 4 years ago

It does give you some sense for how you shrink the problem space fairly quickly--even when you're trying to avoid doing so.

ethbr02• 4 years ago

The essence of any wildly popular single-player game = hard to win quickly + very hard to lose.

Waterluvian3• 4 years ago

Yeah! That reminds me of something a game dev once taught me about single player games. (paraphrasing) "Almost all AAA titles are impossible _not_ to finish in a reasonable time. The entire challenge of balancing a single player game is to hide all the ways the game holds your hand, while making the player feel responsible for all the times you win."

LZ_Khan• 4 years ago

Um.. elden ring?

stevage• 4 years ago

Great comment. I've been playing UFO enemy unknown (the remake) recently and noticing how it fails at this. The original felt like a real simulation of aliens attacking the earth and were always on the brink of taking over. This one feels like a carefully paced story where unless I try really really hard everything is going to be just fine. Which takes away all the drama and hence a lot of the interest.

MetaWhirledPeas• 4 years ago

very hard to lose

Sort of. You could argue that Super Mario Bros. is 99.9% losing for most people. But within those losses are little personal victories, like getting past the first Goomba.

I hate games that try to remove all loss, assuming people can't handle it.

ghaff11• 4 years ago

Yeah, I was never really a serious gamer and, for the most part, I didn't really win--as in get all the way through--most games I played over time. I don't think it's that I couldn't but just wasn't interested enough to put in the time.

pvillano2• 4 years ago

An addictive formula is "hard to win entirely + easy to win a little bit"

examples include arcade machines/roguelike, gotcha/lootboxes/gambling, crosswords

psychologists have found that the most effective reinforcement strategy is a combination of continuous and random rewards. For example, in World of Warcraft, enemies have a small amount of gold, but only a chance of carrying a good item.

uxamanda• 4 years ago

After using WordleBot [0] for a few days, it became clear that my last "random" guess was often the only choice left, so from this sense, this anti-wordle seems impossibly hard.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/upshot/wordle-bot.h...

ghaff11• 4 years ago

One of the reasons I suspect that Wordle is popular is that it's "calibrated" (word length, number of guesses, don't have to play on hard mode) to almost always be winnable if you have some semblance of a decent English vocabulary and some sense for letter combinations.

tablespoon2• 4 years ago

One of the reasons I suspect that Wordle is popular is that it's "calibrated" (word length, number of guesses, don't have to play on hard mode) to almost always be winnable if you have some semblance of a decent English vocabulary and some sense for letter combinations.

Seems like the perfect popular game: be easy enough for most everyone to get, but just hard enough to give a feeling of mastery.

I had a similar feeling when playing Guitar Hero way back. It was pretty easy to get the hang of at a medium level, but it was just hard enough that it felt like an accomplishment. Plus the "output" you got from playing the game well (a complex, professionally played song) was wildly disproportionate to to your inputs (a bit of well-timed button mashing that had a far simpler in structure). The mistakes screwing up the song sealed the illusion of skill.

necovek4• 4 years ago

It seems keyboard is unresponsive on FF mobile: is that just me?

dontwordle11• 4 years ago

Ah haven't tested that but thank you for sharing defects! Will investigate that tonight

necovek4• 4 years ago

FWIW, this was not a proper FF but it's Fennec from F-droid (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/).

ExtraE• 4 years ago

Works for me with FF on iOS.

trebcon• 4 years ago

Works for me on FF Android

resonator• 4 years ago

Me neither. Firefox 97.2.0 on android.

cecilpl2• 4 years ago

I found this challenging but won on my first attempt without any undos.

Spoiler for today's word: https://imgur.com/a/kNvhK0q

bena• 4 years ago

I chose "GREAT", hit that "A", then blanked on any word that didn't have GRET in it at all but had an A in the fourth position.

I then looked up the word list and used the first word that fit the conditions. And that was the word.

kevinpet• 4 years ago

I think the key here is repeated letters. Queue, etc.

lapetitejort• 4 years ago

Seems like the best strategy is to choose words with repeat letters. For example, two great first choices would be LOLLY and SASSY. That's two empty cells that can't be used to guess.

maffydub2• 4 years ago

...unless any of those letters appear in the answer - then you're locked into including them in subsequent guesses!

Even worse if your guess had them in the right location!

ghaff11• 4 years ago

Well, yes, but you're playing the odds. Sure, make the wrong choice and you can lose fast but I'm guessing, statistically, repeated less common letters is the best overall approach over time.

rkimb• 4 years ago

You can't guess Y twice...

jolmg• 4 years ago

first choices

pgreenwood• 4 years ago

SHYLY SLYLY

Morizero• 4 years ago

MAMMA is my go-to

dandanua• 4 years ago

Another strategy is to use rarer letters, like in FUZZY.

spywaregorilla5• 4 years ago

I think no. This one's actually got a lot of depth to it. SASSY and LOLLY use up Y which is critical to forming 5 letter words. S is pretty good too. Preserving your vowels seems to be an important concept. You want to minimize the usage of them. But if you get a single yellow value you can dance around it safely. Or if you get a single green of it and no blacks, you can go for a word using two of that vowel which hopefully doesn't prove to be correct.

WHIZZ seems like it could be a very strong opening move.

VEXED looks pretty promising too.

meatmanek2• 4 years ago

Those are decent words for antiwordle (my usual starting words for that are ESSES, MAMMA, COCCO), but this game is significantly stricter than antiwordle.

A decent strategy for guaranteeing that you can win is:

1. Play good Wordle moves (SOARE, RAISE, CRANE, SLANT/PRICE/DOUGH/BALMY[1], HANDY/SWIFT/GLOVE/CRUMP[2]) so that you can determine what the secret is. 2. Undo each of those so you have no restrictions about what you can play. 3. Figure out a 6-word sequence that you'll be able to play that doesn't include the answer. (I started out with some of those double-letter words, another word that used the remaining vowels, then worked backwards from the end with progressively fewer green letters.)

Though apparently if you type in the secret word, you can't undo that, so it may be valuable to re-do the analysis from the links but looking for words that can't possibly be the answer.

links:

1. https://i-kh.net/2022/04/22/my-lazy-wordle-strategy/ 2. https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/main/ipynb/Wordle.ipy...

mormegil• 4 years ago

Yeah, I guess you can prepare a set of strong (well... weak?) single-vowel words like XYLYL, URUBU, etc. for other vowels, plus the trumps of GRRRL and PHPHT and play these in sequence, undoing if you get a colored square too soon.

necovek4• 4 years ago

I figured I want to try words with fewest unique letters so after a couple of my own guesses, Kagi search brought me to https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/37762/five-lett... — I guess going through these hoping for misses should work well as a strategy.

I still failed as I came to a 50-50% chance at the end (I was choosing between "f" and "v" to start the word, got the rest of them right).

necovek4• 4 years ago

Or maybe not, most of them seem not to be valid choices in DontWordle.

soneca• 4 years ago

I lost. Much harder for my poor non-native English speaker vocabulary. On third guess when it said I had 89 options, I couldn’t think of more than one word.

A feedback: the “you lost” screen passes too quickly, I couldn’t read the word of the day.

dontwordle11• 4 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! I have tried placing the Wordle word in a few different places, but haven't settled on a place that looks good and doesn't make the Game Over flow too complex/jarring. If you want to see the word, it is actually visible in the game, but not in an intuitive spot. When the game ends, the word counts next to each row become clickable (if the count is <=25). You can view the words possible remaining at that stage. The Wordle word will appear all green.

orphea• 4 years ago

It's almost the same for me! I didn't touch original Wordle because I don't know enough of vocabulary. Gave Don't Wordle a try. I guessed the word with 3rd try T_T

dontwordle11• 4 years ago

Hello! I am the creator of Don’t Wordle. Really excited to see this took off today.

I thought I would share some background about the game, some of the iterations I went through, and some of the future features I would like to add.

Background: Like many others, I have been playing Wordle daily. Recently, my Wordle win streak hit 99. I was admittedly very careful with my guesses on Day 100, not wanting to ruin my streak. Then I began to wonder…even if I wanted to lose intentionally, could I do it? Obviously, I could make intentionally bad guesses, but that would take the fun out of it. So I decided to build Don’t Wordle.

Iterations I have gone through:

The first version of the game was simpler and much worse IMO. I did not display the “Valid Words Remaining” at the top, and there was no concept of “Undos". Initially, I actually displayed the Wordle word at the top throughout the entire game! To be honest, that doesn’t change the difficulty of the game that much. However, given that the spirit of the game is not to guess the Wordle word, it seemed like the right decision to hide it.

I created the “Valid Words Remaining” feature when I realized how challenging the game was. I kept getting stuck and wondering whether there were even any words left besides to Wordle word. When I saw how fast the count shrinks, I felt the game was a lot more interesting.

I then added the concept of “Undos” when I realized the game was still too challenging. It’s particulary lame if you’re playing the game for the first time and you get eliminated after just 1 or 2 guesses.

Current Tech Stack:

-Route53 + Cloudfront + S3 + Create React App

Unexpected challenges:

1. The animations. I obviously copied all the concepts from the original Wordle, but I failed to appreciate the complexity.

2. The nuances of the repeat letter words.

3. What makes a Wordle square yellow? The answer is not so simple

4. Trying to get www.dontwordle.com and dontwordle.com to take you to the same URL (either www.dontwordle.com or dontwordle.com) and still support TLS and only use the tech I mentioned above. I actually still don’t have it working perfectly. I know of a solution, but it’s overly complicated

Features I would like to still add:

1. I have heard from multiple people that it’s annoying how you could get the game in an unwinnable state without realizing it. For example, maybe 20 valid words remain, but there is no valid sequence of words remaining to finish the puzzle. While the “Valid Words Remaining” feature is nice, it would also be cool to have a “Valid Solutions Remaining” feature

2. I would like to build a brute force solver that you can watch attempt to play the game in real-time. I have built something similar for a crossword puzzle and really enjoyed watching the computer try to fill the grid. I think it would be cool to do that same thing with this game.

Question I don’t yet know the answer to:

Do any words exist that would not have a single valid solution in this game?

ghaff11• 4 years ago

What makes a Wordle square yellow

One thing I had wondered--but not enough to figure out what the code does...

Let's say you enter Mamma for example. And there is one M in the word but in the second position. Which M square does Wordle choose to turn yellow? (But maybe it doesn't matter?) There may be other cases like that as well.

moron4hire• 4 years ago

From experience, the first M.

julianwachholz2• 4 years ago

For yellow squares, the particular order in which they turn yellow doesn't matter.

The remaining grey Ms tell you the same thing (that those positions don't have an M).

jzimbel• 4 years ago

Here’s the algorithm of the game’s letter marking system, based on my experience reproducing its logic for a script I wrote that computes remaining words from your guesses and their corresponding marks.

Suppose the target word is “polar” and you guess “banal”.

A submitted word is marked in 3 passes.

0. Initial state: (“banal”, “polar”)

1. Zip together the letters of the guess and target words, and loop through the zipped list. When both letters at a position are the same, replace the guess letter with the symbol for “correct” (green) and remove the target letter from the target word. State: (“banGl”, “polr”)

2. Loop through the target word’s letters, replacing the first occurrence (if any) of each one in the guess word with the symbol for “present” (yellow). State: (“banGY”, “polr”)

3. Replace any remaining letters in the guess word with the symbol for “not present” (black). State: (“BBBGY”, “polr”)

Return the marked guess word.

---

Other examples:

0. (“mamma”, “amaze”)

1. (“mamma”, “amaze”)

2. (“YYmmY”, “amaze”)

3. (“YYBBY”, “amaze”)

---

0. (“nieto”, “otoño”)

1. (“nietG”, “otoñ”)

2. (“nieYG”, “otoñ”)

3. (“BBBYG”, “otoñ”)

edit: fixing formatting issues. Sorry, first time posting a comment on here.

hitpointdrew• 4 years ago

Let's say you enter Mamma for example. And there is one M in the word but in the second position. Which M square does Wordle choose to turn yellow? (But maybe it doesn't matter?)

I don’t think it matters, it should just default to the first M.

abofh• 4 years ago

For #4, this is actually frustratingly difficult, but if your constraints are not adding to the complexity, your best bet is to not, and just set your cookies to the domain. But if you like, one approach that would work: - Cert with SAN - CNAME's on the CF distribution - S3 Bucket And the sneaky bit: Use a cloudfront lambda to redirect "wrong" Hosts - comes with a cost, but it's super marginal.

Otherwise, your best approach is sadly a second cloudfront distribution with a different bucket (or bucket path) that just hosts a redirecting index key because you end up fighting stupid AWS design decisions.

Not that I've ever wasted stupid amounts of time on this particular problem...

aidos3• 4 years ago

These days my solution is to put cloudflare in front of it and walk away.

Good game to add to my current daily routine (heardle, Wordle, quordle, worldle), but man is it hard!

Jarwain• 4 years ago

For #4, this is actually frustratingly difficult, but if your constraints are not adding to the complexity, your best bet is to not, and just set your cookies to the domain. But if you like, one approach that would work: - Cert with SAN - CNAME's on the CF distribution - S3 Bucket And the sneaky bit: Use a cloudfront lambda to redirect "wrong" Hosts - comes with a cost, but it's super marginal.
Otherwise, your best approach is sadly a second cloudfront distribution with a different bucket (or bucket path) that just hosts a redirecting index key because you end up fighting stupid AWS design decisions.
Not that I've ever wasted stupid amounts of time on this particular problem...

Doesn't this document[0] cover dealing with ssl on cloud front? Plus Amazon's Cert Manager? Or is it missing something?

Pair that with an redirect/alias of www=>@ and you should be golden?

[0]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...

richardwhiuk• 4 years ago

Could do a JS redirect, falling back to an iframe of the whole page?

thesuitonym• 4 years ago

It's a problem with going `serverless', for sure. To anyone running a proper http server, it's trivial.

dj_mc_merlin• 4 years ago

Not that I've ever wasted stupid amounts of time on this particular problem...

I have also spent _too much time_ trying to get this to work. Gave up and used nginx instead.

TimTheTinker3• 4 years ago

I love the premise! It really pokes fun at how Wordle (and other popular games) are actually pretty hard to lose if you play anywhere above some very low threshold of effort/ability.

it would also be cool to have a “Valid Solutions Remaining” feature

That would be awesome. I suppose the biggest challenge would be to enumerate possible solutions in tree form to allow DFS or BFS searching.

Thanks for sharing!

underdeserver• 4 years ago

I think that's actually what makes Wordle such a genius game - it's hard, you work for it, and it can happen, but you're very unlikely to actually lose!

eternalban• 4 years ago

Set a max 4 tries limit for yourself and see if you can maintain a 100% win streak. I've slipped to 5th on 16% of my wins with the 50% at 4, and 24% at 3 (and two (lucky) hits at 2. which I don't count.)

soxocx2• 4 years ago

4. Trying to get www.dontwordle.com and dontwordle.com to take you to the same URL (either www.dontwordle.com or dontwordle.com) and still support TLS and only use the tech I mentioned above. I actually still don’t have it working perfectly. I know of a solution, but it’s overly complicated

If you use Cloudfront with an S3 bucket as origin for _dontwordle.com_, just create a second Cloudfront with an S3 Bucket for _www.dontwordle.com_ and enable "static website hosting" to redirect to "dontwordle.com" on the second bucket.

dontwordle11• 4 years ago

So you can do this, but it won't support TLS to my knowledge. At least in my testing, it will work to navigate to www.dontwordle.com (you will get redirected to https://dontwordle.com). However, if you tried navigating _directly_ to https://www.dontwordle.com, that would not work. In fact, you can try clicking on https://www.dontwordle.com right now, and it won't work :) To be fair, currently I do not have it implemented exactly the way you described, but I encountered this exact same behavior when I tried it that way

InfoSecErik• 4 years ago

I love the twist on the game, as well as the implementation automagically calling out when I've been defeated. Well done!

FatalLogic2• 4 years ago

Great game. Doesn't it push players towards a strategy of working out the solution 'offline', though?

I mean, you start by playing almost the same as standard Wordle, just to guess the answer, without entering it. Then undo everything. Next, figure out a solution which avoids that word. Finally, type in your entire solution.

This could be a bit grindy, and not in the spirit of the game, but it seems like almost assured to win, or am I wrong?

Edit: If there are fewer undos allowed, this strategy gets more difficult

dontwordle11• 4 years ago

I agree with your take. It's definitely a problem with the current game format. I have thought through some different alternatives, but not a fan of any of them up to this point.

cactus2093• 4 years ago

This is really cool! I've wondered about exactly this same thing. Showing the valid solutions remaining would be really neat as well, because I'm really not sure how to interpret valid words remaining or when to use my undos in the current implementation. (If it's too computationally intensive, I would think you could memoize it across all users' games and that should make it feasible).

One other suggestion, is maybe the win condition shouldn't be exactly the same as in wordle. Instead of only allowing one game per day but using undos to make it easier, maybe allow 5 attempts per day instead? As a player I think it's simpler to be able to retry from the beginning if I lose rather than try to figure out the optimal time to use my undo.

soperj• 4 years ago

for #4 does setting the a record for the naked domain to 174.129.25.170 not support tls?

Humphrey2• 4 years ago

Screen size is slightly too high for iPhone SE, wanna slice off about 50px?

emmelaich• 4 years ago

As a message I prefer 'not in word list' rather than 'invalid'

As it's very unlikely you have every word in your list.

Fileformat• 4 years ago

Shameless plug: I recently updated https://www.redirect2www.com to support https, so set the A record for root pointing to 50.17.181.25

MaxLeiter• 4 years ago

A bug (warning: spoilers): repeated letters don’t work quite right. I have an O at spot 2 thats correct and I had it in the wrong place before. Any word like “XOXOX” reports that O has already been tried in the fourth spot, even though it hasn’t.

Well done!

dontwordle11• 4 years ago

If you wouldn't mind sharing a screen if you encounter that bug again, that would be helpful! Trying to reproduce it right now but cannot.

Is it possible that in an earlier word, you had tried using an O in the 4th spot? That should be the only time that error message appears.

formerkrogemp• 4 years ago

I tried playing. I really did. It just wasn't fun for me. Thanks for making a new game to try!

thaumasiotes2• 4 years ago

What makes a Wordle square yellow? The answer is not so simple

Well, I would say the question is poorly posed. The answer to the question as posed is simple as can be if the guess contains no duplicate letters. But if the guess does contain duplicate letters, the question as posed doesn't necessarily have any answer. It may - if all duplicates should be yellow, or if some of them should be green while all the rest are yellow, there's only one valid way to color the guess. But in the general case, you have some number of green squares, some number of yellow squares, and some number of dead squares, and you can swap yellow for dead without affecting the validity of the coloring.

So the question you should be asking is not "should this square be yellow?" but rather "how many yellow squares should this guess receive?". Then you can just choose appropriate squares to color yellow arbitrarily.

mavili• 4 years ago

Thanks for the fun. Your valid words are a very small subset of the English dictionary, why is that? I recently wrote a simple Wordle 'solver' (https://github.com/beyazhilal/wordle-solver) and although my list contains some invalid words like acronyms, when I was searching for the English dictionary words I always got a list of at least 120k+; but you only have 12k! That obviously makes the game impossible to win.

Don't know about Route53 + Cloudfront combination but your #4 challenge would be super simple with a webserver like apache or nginx.

Closi• 4 years ago

It’s probably because wordle’s word list is known and about 12k words long.

The wordlist can be found on GitHub or by viewing source, so you can probably just discount 90% of the words in your guesser before you even start.

andjd• 4 years ago

Hi.

I don’t know if this is a bug or intentional, but playing today, I was eliminated on the last guess when there was a valid word that was not the wordle word. However, I had used that word previously and it had forced an undo. This came as a surprise, because I knew the word was safe and planned the 5th word to leave that word available.

dontwordle11• 4 years ago

Would you mind sharing a screen of your board? I just tried reproducing what you described, but was unable to do so.

wlupton• 4 years ago

Would it be possible to support high contrast colours? I'm red/green colourblind and find it very hard to distinguish the "right in right place" and "right in wrong place" colours. Thanks!

ajjenkins• 4 years ago

It would be nice if there was a Give Up button. I got down to 30 possible words but could not for the life of me think of what they could be. I was craving that “Ohhhhh!!!!!” feeling when you see what the remaining possible words are.

brk• 4 years ago

Glad I'm not the only one. Got down to 20 possible words, but could not think of any that were valid choices given the letter/position constraints I had gotten to.

zeepzeep• 4 years ago

literally 1 possible word after I entered 2 tries :/ I have no idea which word it is

whimsicalism• 4 years ago

Did you think of focal?

mcv2• 4 years ago

I was down to two words for my last try. I already had a strong suspicion what the word was; undos had gotten me back from a situation where I had 4 of the 5 letters. I just had no idea what the other word could possibly be. If I knew that other word, I'd win. Took me an hour to figure it out.

Aachen• 4 years ago

Agree on this. Some "give up" button that compares how far you got — for example: 3rd guess × 20 valid words remaining = your score — would make this easier to share and compare with others. Right now it's a fun toy but if you can't play together irl there's not an obvious compare method aside from giving the game state in a text message.

yreg• 4 years ago

If you want to give up you can "cheat" by using a tool like https://word.tips/

shp0ngle• 4 years ago

Echo this. Now I am down to 1 possible word, I have no idea what it is, and I just want to know the damn word.

edit: well, I solved it by adding a breakpoint to handleWordFinishedAnimating and printing this.state.targetWord . (The whole game is run in front-end.)

Well, yeah. That was a word.

jtamsut• 4 years ago

This is really well done.

DungZeekFu2• 4 years ago

I seem to have found a bug (or the word list is drastically different from Wordle). The game says I have 3 possible words remaining, but every Wordle solver website says I only have 2 (and I only have 2 guesses remaining, so this is the difference between the game being winnable and not). The guesses I used for today were WRITE,BOODY,VOUCH,COMMA (and at this point the only two possible words are FOCAL and LOCAL, but it says that there are 3 possible words).

Another point of confusion is that the first row says 2318 possible words, but there only seem to be 2309 words in the dictionary in the code

npilk• 4 years ago

This may be a spoiler somehow, but one of my guesses was ZONAL, which appears to be valid based on what you’ve guessed so far? That could be the 3rd possible word. I don’t know if it’s in the Wordle list or not.

EDIT: this isn’t it - I missed the C in COMMA!

ghaff11• 4 years ago

No C in ZONAL.

djsamseng• 4 years ago

SOCAS?

jeffbee• 4 years ago

Safety of Cats at Sea?

layer8• 4 years ago

When I played I tried BOCCA without knowing what it means (I was probably half-thinking of Boccia), and it was accepted.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bocca

Edit: The sibling with SOCAS is right.

marcruser• 4 years ago

The game says I have 3 possible words remaining, but every Wordle solver website says I only have 2

Once you finish the game, if you have any rows with 25 or fewer valid words remaining (shown to the right of the row), the word count becomes clickable. It will open a modal that will show you the valid words remaining after that stage of the game. I went ahead and entered your same sequence of words, and the the other word remaining was SOCAS. That is a valid word in the NYT official Wordle game.

Another point of confusion is that the first row says 2318 possible words, but there only seem to be 2309 words in the dictionary in the code

There are different word dictionaries in the code.

phnofive• 4 years ago

There are three words that match - FOCAL, VOCAL, LOCAL - but of course you can't use 'V' in position one again, so that's a bug.

There are two dictionaries, and the second contains 2309 entries which are found in the 12974 entries of the first.

re• 4 years ago

every Wordle solver website says I only have 2

There are two different Wordle word lists--the set of legal guesses (roughly 13k) and the set of words in the solution list (roughly 2k). The latter list is curated to be a set of fair, interesting words, excluding plurals and more obscure words. Most Wordle solvers use knowledge of what words are in the Wordle solution database to pare down the set of "possible words". But with Don't Wordle, the "legal guess" list ends up being the more interesting one to show "remaining possibilities" for.

https://scoredle.com/ is a site that shows possible remaining words using the larger "legal guess" list, so you can see that you could have also guessed "SOCAS".

Another point of confusion is that the first row says 2318 possible words, but there only seem to be 2309 words in the dictionary in the code

There were 2318 remaining possible words AFTER your first guess, which eliminated ~11k possibilities.

gmiller123456• 4 years ago

Possible: focal, local, socas

skykooler• 4 years ago

I managed to win by discovering COXAL was a word, through brute force.

DungZeekFu2• 4 years ago

I see, you have to be able to guess the possible list not just the answer list. This is very unfortunate and makes the game nearly impossible.

gjm11• 4 years ago

Closely related (meaning: I think it might be exactly the same game): Antiwordle, https://www.antiwordle.com/ .

[EDITED to add:] Not exactly the same; with Antiwordle the idea is just to last as long as you can, rather than having a limit of 6, and it doesn't have undos. Also, UX-wise, I don't think Antiwordle tells you how many possibilities remain (win for Don't Wordle), and it doesn't have such slow tile-flipping animations (win for Antiwordle).

meatmanek2• 4 years ago

The gameplay is a bit more like antiwordle's hard mode, in that it won't let you play a letter that you've eliminated in a particular column -- e.g. if you guess HELLO and antiwordle tells you you've got one green L and one grey L, you can still play CALLS or ALLOW in antiwordle's easy mode.

banana_giraffe• 4 years ago

I like this one better, the undo button is a nice touch.

xipho• 4 years ago

My uncle, a Scrabble nut, proposed this exact derivative game to me well over a month ago, it's amazing to see ideas emerge in parallel. Feels like "if you've thought of it someone else has already" is more of a Law then a quip at this point.

TimTheTinker3• 4 years ago

I guess you could say the question isn't whether your idea is unique, but whether you've put in the time and effort to develop it, and whether your execution is good.

julianwachholz2• 4 years ago

Hard agree. 15 minutes after my very first tweet about my variant, somebody else announced theirs with the exact same concept! I mean what are the odds?

jstummbillig• 4 years ago

It's amazing to experience how this one design change completely ruins the game experience for me. And I really mean that: Totally unexpected before I actually gave it a go. Fascinating.

alliao• 4 years ago

my lack of progress frustrates :P

Minor49er• 4 years ago

I got down to one of two possible words and managed to guess the right one. I like this twist on the original

sevenf0ur• 4 years ago

My minor nitpick would be to show the hint / toast every time Enter is pressed, not just the first time.

dontwordle11• 4 years ago

Thank you! This is on my list of defects

peeters• 4 years ago

Really fun! My strategy was to try to figure out the word, undo back to the beginning, then construct a backwards chain. Much easier to work backwards because you can be a lot less efficient about it.

indecisive_user• 4 years ago

Here's my attempt to maximize the amount of remaining words. I ended with 7 still remaining.

It was tough to come up with any sequence that didn't have a 50/50 chance of losing on the last guess.

https://i.imgur.com/2qZgr15.png

mrweasel• 4 years ago

As a non-English speaker, how is phpht even at word?

jimbob21• 4 years ago

I would guess some sort of onomatopoeia, but I couldn't guess what its trying to imitate. Maybe an uncommon spelling of "pfft?"

giyanani• 4 years ago

Jane street had a puzzle related to this, called eldrow [1], a few months ago.

The gist is you’re trying to find the worst sequence of (hard mode) guesses possible for any word in the wordle set.

Their site shows submissions of up to 16 words and claims 17 is impossible [2]. I’ve been trying to do the same, but have yet to cut the search space enough[3].

Ex: calculating the worst chain for jazzy (with a 1000 word subset of the full word list) took an m1 core 1 hour and resulted in the ten-word chain:

civic, buggy, woody, array, leaky, mammy, fanny, happy, tasty, jazzy

[1] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-index/ [2] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-solution/ [3] https://github.com/roshangiyanani/wordle/blob/main/wordle/el...

KerrickStaley• 4 years ago

I was able to win by starting with the 3 guesses JUJUS, IMMIX, PZAZZ and going from there. These words were taking from the worst starting words list at https://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best..., which is a great writeup on optimal Wordle strategy.

Ninjinka• 4 years ago

Whew got it with 2 options left...50/50.

JoshTriplett2• 4 years ago

I managed to figure out what the word most likely was after a few guesses (which were intended to be unlikely sets of letters but ended up narrowing the possibilities quickly), then undo a few times, then carefully made six guesses such that I never got a single green tile.

pontus• 4 years ago

It's a fun idea, but I found it super frustrating because it gets harder and harder to come up with consistent words.

I'd personally like an "easy setting" where there's another key color that indicates if a letter is viable. So when there are only say 10 possible words left it'd highlight the letter the word could start with. Maybe it's just me though.

veryfancy• 4 years ago

"Created by Don Twordle"

qrian• 4 years ago

Got it first try without undoing! Key was guessing the answer at like step 4 and reverse engineering it from the back.

Don't Wordle 8 - SURVIVED Hooray! I didn't Wordle today! ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜6438 ⬜⬜⬜⬜470 ⬜⬜⬜⬜132 ⬜⬜⬜⬜15 ⬜⬜⬜⬜4 ⬜1 Undos used: 0

ki_• 4 years ago

fun game, i tried, i got to the last row, but there was only 1 word left, so i lost. My strategy was to use words that use many of the same letters. e.g. "rotor". I might be able to beat it, but, at row 4, finding words is really really difficult.

JADev62096• 4 years ago

I did better than I usually do, because don't wordle forced me to use higher quality guesses. :)

tylorr• 4 years ago

A share feature that uses discord spoiler syntax to include but hide your guesses would be appreciated. Discord uses ||spoiler here|| syntax. The dordle [1] game variants has this share option.

[1] https://zaratustra.itch.io/dordle

soylentgraham3• 4 years ago

Already love it, but can you fit it onto an iphone SE display please! Im scrolling and zooming all over the place (some of us like small phones :)

dontwordle11• 4 years ago

Would you mind sharing a screenshot of what it looks like for you currently? I am admittedly still learning how to best support cross-device compatibility. I have found that in the Chrome Dev Tools preview for certain devices, everything looks fine, but then in reality things don't fit properly

soylentgraham3• 4 years ago

https://twitter.com/soylentgraham/status/1531897895686914050...

soylentgraham3• 4 years ago

You gotta use safari dev tools for a chunk of ios quirks, not chrome :) (Though some things like accidental zoom and navigation popup-from-bottom needs a device to test :/

memorable• 4 years ago

Too difficult for me lmao.

butwhywhyoh• 4 years ago

The limitations are immediately aggravating. Have to reuse correct letters and can't reuse incorrect letters.

nerdponx• 4 years ago

That's the whole point.

whynotkeithberg2• 4 years ago

Yeah and it's not fun is his point. Way to forced & guided. It's like playing a racing simulator but you're on a rail system that you can't deviate from dead middle of the track once you managed to get on course even if you don't have a clue where you're supposed to be going.

teach• 4 years ago

It's interesting -- I only play Wordle on hard mode, so these "restrictions" seem perfectly good and fine to me. I guess if you're not used to it they seem onerous.

Though I guess to be fair Wordle doesn't force hard mode, so it seems this version shouldn't either.

fumeux_fume• 4 years ago

Thanks for making this.

Humphrey2• 4 years ago

Cant you make the vertical height on mobile about 50px less, so it does not scroll in full screen on an iPhone SE. Thanks!

efitz• 4 years ago

This is an interesting (and hard) game. However, it's not representative of a "perfect" game; players often make choices that are independent of the knowledge that they obtained from their last guess. For example, it's very common to guess the first 1-3 words based on letter frequency and non-overlap vs. always using the results of the previous guess.

So again, overall it's cool, but too hard (for me) to seem fun, and it's a very different game than Wordle even though the primary mechanism is the same.

JacobAldridge• 4 years ago

The way you describe Wordle is exactly how I play; however I play on Easy Mode, while this game uses Worlde’s Hard Mode rules about reusing green and yellow letters.

gcr• 4 years ago

Hey this is great! I wrote a similar game for pico8 back in February: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=106664

Aeolun• 4 years ago

For me this “game” can be summarrized as:

First guess. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

The application won’t let me do anything even mildly suboptimal, and it’s not fun at all (aside from a brain exercise).

whynotkeithberg2• 4 years ago

Yeah my thoughts exactly... Blocking out all formerly used letters makes it way too easy/hard, whatever you wanna call it. Just wasn't fun because unless you can think of the exact word you can't really put any other guesses together.

Gameksy2• 4 years ago

Hey dontwordle!

My team and I build fun instant games. Many of them are actually word games. We saw your post and found your thoughts very interesting!

We would love to chat and explore how we could maybe work on new games together! Lmk what's the best way to connect:)

Tepix• 4 years ago

You might want to put your contact details in your profile

Gameksy2• 4 years ago

should be there

mleonhard• 4 years ago

SPOILER WARNING. There seems to be a bug. I guessed 'rhyme', 'build', 'tonal', and 'local'. Then it said that I must use an UNDO. It doesn't let me enter 'vocal' and 'focal' to win.

qyph• 4 years ago

The goal is to avoid entering the word. In this case 'focal' was the word. You entered 4 guesses, but only had 1 valid guess, + the 'wordle' left so it was impossible to finish without undoing.

hansvm• 4 years ago

The constraints are interesting. You can drastically cut down on both average and max guesses by _not_ reusing letters.

gordon_freeman• 4 years ago

On a side note about my actual Wordle stats: I’m currently clocking in at 97% after more than 110 plays and my highest streak is 37. Now I’m getting so good at this that I finish it within a few seconds. I’m mentioning all this because when I started playing it for the first time it used to take me more than 20 mins. Funny how practice makes you almost perfect. :)

xylophoner• 4 years ago

tried, got stuck on guess 2. frustrating, not fun for me

spoonjim• 4 years ago

The UI of this game makes you appreciate how much of a technical achievement Wordle is.

anoncow2• 4 years ago

Damn. That makes wordle look impossible to not win at. Do you think you can be sued? Is this fair use?

dontwordle11• 4 years ago

IANAL. The Wordle game says "Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted" in the source code. Seemed safe, but who knows.

anoncow2• 4 years ago

I asked because of what Apple did to Wordle clones. But I now see that may have been primarily done to remove low quality copies spamming the Appstore. More power to you. Your app is fun and painfully enjoyable.

User23• 4 years ago

Clever. As my first guess, choosing words that repeat as many letters as possible appears to be the way to go. For example: toots

BobNewby• 4 years ago

Oh i can and i did. Even normal wordle is frustratingly difficult for me.

mcv2• 4 years ago

This one is much harder than I expected, or even seems reasonable. I have no problem at all with Wordle, Worldle, Quordle, etc, but this one had me stumped for a long time. I expected I wouldn't really need those undos, but they're absolutely vital.

It's a great alternative for anyone looking for more challenge out of their word guessing game.

caymanjim• 4 years ago

Not to rain on your parade, but if this gets at all popular, you're going to have trademark problems. I doubt you'd get in any trouble, but get ready to change domain names.

Cool idea though.

TuringTest• 4 years ago

Similar in spirit: Absurdle, [1] which tries to make you lse as hard as it can (instead of choosing a hidden word at first, it keeps track of all valid words compatible with your guesses so far and compares your tries with the remaining ones, choosing the one with less letters in common).

[1] https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html

pvillano2• 4 years ago

smh my head, a truly adversarial wordle would just use your first guess

wiredfool• 4 years ago

I basically lost on my first try - 4 words remaining and 5 guesses left.

aabbcc1241• 4 years ago

Tried on firefox mobile with javascript enabled, I tried to tape the in-page visual keyboard buttons but no response.

Does it work on mobile without physical keyboard?

bryanmccann• 4 years ago

I won today with no undos and I'm more proud of that than winning any wordle, heardle, semantle, or any of the rest. Came down to 2 words remaining, one more guess. Phew! Great game; thanks for making it!

kurupt213• 4 years ago

The remaining word feature is huge. Good call.

anonymoushn• 4 years ago

I don't think MEATH is a valid word in Wordle.

Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

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