4 states x 5 letters x 9 guesses is only 180 possible stoplight strings (of green/yellow/gray/black), if I'm doing my math right? So you could just pick 180 emoji and use four of them :)
I thought about this as well, but sadly, last I checked some decently popular apps (Twitter, WhatsApp, some others) don't support emojis in URL paths, only in domain names. So the emoji technique could work for message threads in some apps, but it would look pretty strange in others.
(I've been helping @DungZeekFu a bit with Quordle and am curious for any ideas around this though!)
Well, you need 180 characters, so are there 90 good usable characters, or 60, or 45 that will work?
I’m not suggesting doing a full UTF mapping onto base64, but just 1..180 mod 3 => char base64[3] would give you 182 board positions in three URL characters.
base64 would be pretty neat! I also wonder what non-emoji unicode characters are commonly supported in paths... If say, CJK character sets were supported by most apps, single-character paths would even work.