7 ms·

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

676 points by dontwordle 4y ago

ajjenkins 4y 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.
- Aachen 4y 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.
- brk 4y 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 4y ago
    literally 1 possible word after I entered 2 tries :/ I have no idea which word it is
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Did you think of focal?
  - mcv 4y 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.
- yreg 4y ago
  If you want to give up you can "cheat" by using a tool like https://word.tips/ https://word.tips/
- shp0ngle 4y 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.
peeters 4y 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.
fumeux_fume 4y ago
Thanks for making this.
Aeolun 4y 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).
- whynotkeithberg 4y 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.
gordon_freeman 4y 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. :)
bryanmccann 4y 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!
spoonjim 4y ago
The UI of this game makes you appreciate how much of a technical achievement Wordle is.
jtamsut 4y ago
This is really well done.
zwieback 4y ago
Fun, clever and hard! Failed miserably first attempt.
- ghaff 4y 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.
ar_lan 4y 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.
- sateesh 4y ago
  Along with these ones that are hard for me to get right are when the letters are repeated.
  - ghaff 4y 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.
- zwieback 4y 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 4y ago
  Wordle is simply not meant to be played on hard mode.
  - andrewflnr 4y 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.
ethbr0 4y ago
The essence of any wildly popular single-player game = hard to win quickly + very hard to lose.
- Waterluvian 4y 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 4y ago
    Um.. elden ring?
    - mwaitjmp 4y ago
      Any soulsborne game for that matter. They are all a long enjoyable slog. Recommended for sure.
    - azemetre 4y ago
      Literally spent 50 hours mucking around exploring everything I could before realizing that you have to fight Margit to progress the story. I honestly thought it was a game like Shadow of the Colossus where you freely explore and just fight bosses. Fun game but some very terrible UX decisions that seem spiteful at times.
      - ar_lan 4y ago
        I did the same exact thing. In fact, the whole rest of lakes of Niurnia I had found far earlier than I found Margit because I accidentally found the shortcut and thought - well, he was blocking this path, so I guess he's not necessary.
        4y ago
uxamanda 4y 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.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/upshot/wordle-bot.h...
- ghaff 4y 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.
  - tablespoon 4y 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.
    - noirbot 4y ago
      And the real value of it is that within "success" there's ranges. The real victory for me is if I can get Wordle in less than 4 guesses, since that's about how fast one can do it with optimal play. I don't really usually have a risk of "losing", but for me it's a bummer if I get to guess 5 or 6. Not everything has to be pass/fail, and most things in life aren't.
necovek 4y ago
It seems keyboard is unresponsive on FF mobile: is that just me?
- dontwordle 4y ago
  Ah haven't tested that but thank you for sharing defects! Will investigate that tonight
  - necovek 4y 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/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/).
- ExtraE 4y ago
  Works for me with FF on iOS.
- trebcon 4y ago
  Works for me on FF Android
- resonator 4y ago
  Me neither. Firefox 97.2.0 on android.
cecilpl2 4y ago
I found this challenging but won on my first attempt without any undos. Spoiler for today's word: https://imgur.com/a/kNvhK0q https://imgur.com/a/kNvhK0q
- bena 4y 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 4y ago
I think the key here is repeated letters. Queue, etc.
lapetitejort 4y 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.
- mormegil 4y 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.
- maffydub 4y 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!
  - ghaff 4y 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.
    - maffydub 4y ago
      Agreed. I didn't want to spoil at the time, but yesterday you would have been unlucky with both these word choices!
- rkimb 4y ago
  You can't guess Y twice...
  - jolmg 4y ago
    > first choices
  - pgreenwood 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
necovek 4y 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-letter-english-word-that-contains-only-two-distinct-letters 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).
- necovek 4y ago
  Or maybe not, most of them seem not to be valid choices in DontWordle.
soneca 4y 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.
- dontwordle 4y 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 4y 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
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dontwordle 4y 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?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
DungZeekFu 4y 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 4y 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!
  - ghaff 4y ago
    No C in ZONAL.
- djsamseng 4y ago
  SOCAS?
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Safety of Cats at Sea?
- layer8 4y 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 https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bocca Edit: The sibling with SOCAS is right.
- marcruser 4y 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.
gjm11 4y ago
Closely related (meaning: I think it might be exactly the same game): Antiwordle, https://www.antiwordle.com/ 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).
- meatmanek 4y 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 4y ago
Similar to https://lazyguyy.github.io/survivle/ https://lazyguyy.github.io/survivle/ I like this one better, the undo button is a nice touch.
xipho 4y 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.
- TimTheTinker 4y 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.
- julianwachholz 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
my lack of progress frustrates :P
Minor49er 4y 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 4y ago
My minor nitpick would be to show the hint / toast every time Enter is pressed, not just the first time.
- dontwordle 4y ago
  Thank you! This is on my list of defects
indecisive_user 4y 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 https://i.imgur.com/2qZgr15.png
- mrweasel 4y ago
  As a non-English speaker, how is phpht even at word?
  - jimbob21 4y 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 4y 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/ https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-index/ [2] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-solution/ https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-solution/ [3] https://github.com/roshangiyanani/wordle/blob/main/wordle/eldrow.py https://github.com/roshangiyanani/wordle/blob/main/wordle/el...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
KerrickStaley 4y 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_strategies_for_Wordle https://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best..., which is a great writeup on optimal Wordle strategy.
Ninjinka 4y ago
Whew got it with 2 options left...50/50.
JoshTriplett 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
"Created by Don Twordle"
qrian 4y 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_ 4y 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 4y ago
I did better than I usually do, because don't wordle forced me to use higher quality guesses. :)
tylorr 4y 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 https://zaratustra.itch.io/dordle
soylentgraham 4y 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 :)
- dontwordle 4y 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
  - soylentgraham 4y 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 :/
  - soylentgraham 4y ago
    https://twitter.com/soylentgraham/status/1531897895686914050?s=21 https://twitter.com/soylentgraham/status/1531897895686914050...
    - dontwordle 4y ago
      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.
butwhywhyoh 4y ago
The limitations are immediately aggravating. Have to reuse correct letters and can't reuse incorrect letters.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  That's the whole point.
  - whynotkeithberg 4y 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 4y 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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - EntropicBrew 4y ago
      You could just keep guessing words which have all grayed out letters. The only way this version works is using the 'hard' mode.
memorable 4y ago
Too difficult for me lmao.
Humphrey 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
Hey this is great! I wrote a similar game for pico8 back in February: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=106664 https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=106664
Gameksy 4y 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 4y ago
  You might want to put your contact details in your profile
  - Gameksy 4y ago
    should be there
mleonhard 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
The constraints are interesting. You can drastically cut down on both average and max guesses by _not_ reusing letters.
xylophoner 4y ago
tried, got stuck on guess 2. frustrating, not fun for me
anoncow 4y ago
Damn. That makes wordle look impossible to not win at. Do you think you can be sued? Is this fair use?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dontwordle 4y 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.
  - anoncow 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
Oh i can and i did. Even normal wordle is frustratingly difficult for me.
mcv 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html
- pvillano 4y ago
  smh my head, a truly adversarial wordle would just use your first guess
wiredfool 4y ago
I basically lost on my first try - 4 words remaining and 5 guesses left.
aabbcc1241 4y 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?
kurupt213 4y ago
The remaining word feature is huge. Good call.
anonymoushn 4y ago
I don't think MEATH is a valid word in Wordle.

676 points by dontwordle 4y 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.

Aachen 4y 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.
brk 4y 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 4y ago
  literally 1 possible word after I entered 2 tries :/ I have no idea which word it is
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Did you think of focal?
- mcv 4y 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.
yreg 4y ago
If you want to give up you can "cheat" by using a tool like https://word.tips/ https://word.tips/
shp0ngle 4y 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.

peeters 4y 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.

fumeux_fume 4y ago

Thanks for making this.

Aeolun 4y 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).

whynotkeithberg 4y 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.

gordon_freeman 4y 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. :)

bryanmccann 4y 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!

spoonjim 4y ago

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

jtamsut 4y ago

This is really well done.

zwieback 4y ago

Fun, clever and hard! Failed miserably first attempt.

ghaff 4y 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.

ar_lan 4y 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.

sateesh 4y ago
Along with these ones that are hard for me to get right are when the letters are repeated.
- ghaff 4y 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.
zwieback 4y 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 4y ago
Wordle is simply not meant to be played on hard mode.
- andrewflnr 4y 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.

ethbr0 4y ago

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

Waterluvian 4y 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 4y ago
  Um.. elden ring?
  - mwaitjmp 4y ago
    Any soulsborne game for that matter. They are all a long enjoyable slog. Recommended for sure.
  - azemetre 4y ago
    Literally spent 50 hours mucking around exploring everything I could before realizing that you have to fight Margit to progress the story. I honestly thought it was a game like Shadow of the Colossus where you freely explore and just fight bosses. Fun game but some very terrible UX decisions that seem spiteful at times.
    - ar_lan 4y ago
      I did the same exact thing. In fact, the whole rest of lakes of Niurnia I had found far earlier than I found Margit because I accidentally found the shortcut and thought - well, he was blocking this path, so I guess he's not necessary.
      - 4y ago

uxamanda 4y 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.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/upshot/wordle-bot.h...

ghaff 4y 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.
- tablespoon 4y 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.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    And the real value of it is that within "success" there's ranges. The real victory for me is if I can get Wordle in less than 4 guesses, since that's about how fast one can do it with optimal play. I don't really usually have a risk of "losing", but for me it's a bummer if I get to guess 5 or 6. Not everything has to be pass/fail, and most things in life aren't.

necovek 4y ago

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

dontwordle 4y ago
Ah haven't tested that but thank you for sharing defects! Will investigate that tonight
- necovek 4y 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/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/).
ExtraE 4y ago
Works for me with FF on iOS.
trebcon 4y ago
Works for me on FF Android
resonator 4y ago
Me neither. Firefox 97.2.0 on android.

cecilpl2 4y ago

I found this challenging but won on my first attempt without any undos. Spoiler for today's word: https://imgur.com/a/kNvhK0q https://imgur.com/a/kNvhK0q

bena 4y 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 4y ago

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

lapetitejort 4y 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.

mormegil 4y 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.
maffydub 4y 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!
- ghaff 4y 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.
  - maffydub 4y ago
    Agreed. I didn't want to spoil at the time, but yesterday you would have been unlucky with both these word choices!
rkimb 4y ago
You can't guess Y twice...
- jolmg 4y ago
  > first choices
- pgreenwood 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

necovek 4y 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-letter-english-word-that-contains-only-two-distinct-letters 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).

necovek 4y ago
Or maybe not, most of them seem not to be valid choices in DontWordle.

soneca 4y 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.

dontwordle 4y 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 4y 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

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dontwordle 4y 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?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

DungZeekFu 4y 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 4y 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!
- ghaff 4y ago
  No C in ZONAL.
djsamseng 4y ago
SOCAS?
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Safety of Cats at Sea?
layer8 4y 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 https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bocca Edit: The sibling with SOCAS is right.
marcruser 4y 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.

gjm11 4y ago

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

meatmanek 4y 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 4y ago

Similar to https://lazyguyy.github.io/survivle/ https://lazyguyy.github.io/survivle/ I like this one better, the undo button is a nice touch.

xipho 4y 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.

TimTheTinker 4y 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.
julianwachholz 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago

my lack of progress frustrates :P

Minor49er 4y 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 4y ago

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

dontwordle 4y ago
Thank you! This is on my list of defects

indecisive_user 4y 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 https://i.imgur.com/2qZgr15.png

mrweasel 4y ago
As a non-English speaker, how is phpht even at word?
- jimbob21 4y 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 4y 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/ https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-index/ [2] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-solution/ https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-solution/ [3] https://github.com/roshangiyanani/wordle/blob/main/wordle/eldrow.py https://github.com/roshangiyanani/wordle/blob/main/wordle/el...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

KerrickStaley 4y 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_strategies_for_Wordle https://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best..., which is a great writeup on optimal Wordle strategy.

Ninjinka 4y ago

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

JoshTriplett 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago

"Created by Don Twordle"

qrian 4y 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_ 4y 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 4y ago

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

tylorr 4y 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 https://zaratustra.itch.io/dordle

soylentgraham 4y 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 :)

dontwordle 4y 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
- soylentgraham 4y 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 :/
- soylentgraham 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/soylentgraham/status/1531897895686914050?s=21 https://twitter.com/soylentgraham/status/1531897895686914050...
  - dontwordle 4y ago
    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.

butwhywhyoh 4y ago

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

nerdponx 4y ago
That's the whole point.
- whynotkeithberg 4y 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 4y 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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - EntropicBrew 4y ago
    You could just keep guessing words which have all grayed out letters. The only way this version works is using the 'hard' mode.

memorable 4y ago

Too difficult for me lmao.

Humphrey 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago

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

Gameksy 4y 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 4y ago
You might want to put your contact details in your profile
- Gameksy 4y ago
  should be there

mleonhard 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago

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

xylophoner 4y ago

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

anoncow 4y ago

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

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dontwordle 4y 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.
- anoncow 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago

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

mcv 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html

pvillano 4y ago
smh my head, a truly adversarial wordle would just use your first guess

wiredfool 4y ago

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

aabbcc1241 4y 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?

kurupt213 4y ago

The remaining word feature is huge. Good call.

anonymoushn 4y ago

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