dontwordle

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.

Thanks for sharing that! I probably won't be able to update this week, but this bug is definitely at the top of my list.

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.

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

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

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.

Thank you! This is on my list of defects

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

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?

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.

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