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?
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...
If you’re statically hosting on s3 then that isn’t an option while also supporting tls. You need something in front. You can go the cloudfront route but last time I looked it was all a bit of a pain. Cloudflare takes minutes to set up and the whole thing will be done and maintenance free.
> 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?
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.
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!
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.)
> 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.
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
Yup, been there. Have a look to see if cloudflare will do what you need within the free plan. You just point it at the bucket, add a rule for the redirect and all the tls is handled for you. It’s pretty painless. Feel free to ping me if you want to run through the steps.
It was some tinkering around with bucket name (has to match the subdomain.domain.tld) and the cloudfront origin settings. But it works flawlessly. Feel free to ping me if you need details.
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.
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
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.
What if you had to earn your undos? As opposed to starting with N of them in the beginning.
What if you scored like wordle but based on undos? 1 undo used, 2 undos used... Up to 5 undos used. This incentivizes the user to try and not undo if possible.
I think the eliminated score method is kind of redundant with the wordled scoring, just make the player guess the 1 word left and be wordled?
Really cool and fun idea, we had a great time playing with it and probably will add it to our daily rotation.
Maybe just give the player the word and no undos? There's no mystery then, it's just chess, but it would further cement the game as the opposite of wordle.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I think in general the rule is this:
- Any Ms in the correct position turn green (duh)
- If there are X Ms remaining in the answer, turn the first X (non-green) Ms in the guess yellow
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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."
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.
From Soft games are, I think, popular with a particular niche precisely because they swim against the tide here.
Even their games, though, although they are famously and genuinely difficult, do try and guide the player to success. They just do it in somewhat subtle ways by trying to kill you a lot. I’ve been watching a let’s play series on YouTube of Dark Souls I & III for a while (“Souls Academy”), and one of things I enjoy about it is how they often talk about what skills particular bosses or game areas are trying to teach you, so that you can be successful with later, harder challenges.
But you’re completely right that these games aren’t “hard not to finish”. They’re extremely hard to finish!
I thought Elden Ring was a bit weird in this regard. Margit is likely the first boss people fight. And he does introduce a lot of concepts that seem pertinent. He's classic souls boss with a few touches of the game's unique concepts. He hits very fast, sometimes without telegraphing. If you're competent at Margit then Godrey is likely to be mechanically simpler.
But then for some reason every single other major boss is very gimmicky and does not draw upon this. Radahn is a (fun) clusterfuck with yer boys. Rennala just has projectiles and no defenses. Rykard is... just poorly designed and can't hit you if you're in melee range. Fire Giant is a gimmicky horse battle. Astel is sort of similar to Rennala. Hoarah does his own thing with grabs and jumpable stomps. Malekith and Malenia are so awkwardly fast that you need to be proactively positioning rather than reacting to their telegraphed moves for the most part.
Then you've got at the endgame Morgot and Radagon who, for some reason, seem to be not only simpler, but significantly slower opponents than Margit.
Not a complaint really. I thought boss design was great and entertaining. But definitely a bit unusual. Sekiro's boss progression was amazing and the best I've ever seen. It's a really great inflection point when Genichiro swings by to make sure you understand the game's not gonna fuck around anymore.
I found the biggest challenge with Margit was that he telegraphs too much. Hell raise his weapon and then just hold it much longer than you think he will, you roll early and then he punishes you.
And I'd argue they wouldn't be as successful as they are if they weren't a rejection of something players sense in most other games, even if they don't consciously notice the systems helping them.
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.
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.
I didn’t find the shortcut around Stormveil until my second character. After a while I realized that Margit-Stormveil-Godrick are all completely optional.
I wrote an entire section about Soulsborne in my original comment but felt I was biting off too much.
Soulsborne games succeed because of exactly this. And you might notice that they’re drifting towards mainstream and that’s actually causing them to shed all the little details of what makes a Soulsborne game.
Elden Ring was ridiculously forgiving and I found it boringly easy. But it made me go back to Demon’s Souls.
This is something I didn't like about the game. They always had multiplayer so difficulty has always been... optional in a way. But the summons in this game are extremely powerful, and they change the dynamics of the fight from slowly mastering an encounter to high variance gambles on being able to capitalize on the boss just not looking at you. Which is fine. You can just not use summons. But then you see something like the godskin duo with a premade npc ally outside to be summoned and you start to get conflicting feelings about what's appropriate "intended" difficulty.
I had the same thought - there's too much practice needed considering how little free time I have. I downloaded a trainer (I play on PC) and modified my stats a bit so I don't die so easily and don't feel like I needed to grind to level up
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
On the high levels of Expert play, Guitar Hero is insanely difficult. So it happens to offer a wide range of feeling mastery at all gameplay levels. I'm a mid-range Expert player, and if what I feel while I play feels even a tiny sliver like what an actual performer feels, then holy shit. The community even makes songs that utterly outstrip the "officially" authored songs in difficulty, that make Through the Fire and Flames seem like Slow Ride.
If you keep in mind that it is not, indeed, a real guitar, the sense of accomplishment doesn't have to be false. When I full combo a fairly difficult song, especially if it's one that I've gotten close but not quite got, it really feels like an accomplishment. Also, I'm active on the modding side of things for GH1/2/80s/RB, and that is where my true sense of accomplishment has rested. I've been involved with the mod projects Guitar Hero II Deluxe, Rock Band 2 Deluxe, and Rock Band 3 Deluxe, all of which have been wildly successful within the GH community.
Easy to learn, impossible to master is actually one of the classic tenets of game design. I'm genuinely curious, did you hear this or variant somewhere before, or did you come up with this on your own?
> Easy to learn, impossible to master is actually one of the classic tenets of game design. I'm genuinely curious, did you hear this or variant somewhere before, or did you come up with this on your own?
I came up with it on my own. I derived it from some introspection on how Guitar Hero made me feel, and realizing it tricked me into feeling a false sense of competence, like I could actually play those songs well.
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
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.
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.
>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.
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).
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).
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It can be a somewhat different game depending on who you play "with." You probably follow different strategies if your primary strategy is not to lose vs. if you're strategy is to get the best score you can (as my group does). I figure that I will only go for two if I come out of the first guess with a lot of information. But otherwise, I do generally shoot for 3.
Personally, I think that’s what makes hard mode interesting, that it creates a sort of meta-game for figuring out a reliable way to avoid these pathological cases.
It likely does mean you’ll have to sacrifice a lower average guess count in favor of avoiding losses.
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.
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.
I like it. I wonder if you could calculate how evil a solution would be in that regard, i.e. how likely you are to end up in a canyon. Maybe you could count how many substrings also occur in other valid words or something.
I never dove into the topic any deeper but I suspect that there is probably cryptanalysis literature related to letter string frequency--or just take a dictionary and brute force a substring frequency analysis.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Meh, on normal mode it resolves down to can you solve a 5-letter anagram with placement clues. I pick a new starting word each day (definitely sub-optimal) and play hard mode.
It got way too easy and boring to use the same word. It's common amongst my friends to have multiple guesses queued up based on what the first word clues give them. I usually just yolo it and for once my awful memory works for me - I can barely remember my first guess from the previous day let alone the subsequent guesses so every day is a brand new game with a different strategy every day.
I usually do a two word opening sequence and go on from that in normal mode. Seems a reasonable compromise.
I actually tired of the multiword Wordle "clones" for the reason that you say. I found you pretty much had to do a 3 or 4 word opening sequence and then mostly solve anagrams. Otherwise you end up wasting too many guesses trying to solve one word that has a lot of options.
That's me, sometimes it takes me many minutes to pick a starting word I haven't used yet, usually I look around the room until I spot something with five letters.
My guess is it was an easy, logical thing to add, and he didn't immediately see that some words would be impossible to solve. And you can't just delete a feature, even if the stakes were bigger than some players opting into extra frustration.
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.
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?