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Analyzed from 2331 words in the discussion.

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#word#game#words#wordle#letters#letter#guess#once#same#more

Discussion (127 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

amiga3861 day ago
12935 -> TIZZY (5625) -> OXBOW (2674) -> GRUFF (858) -> MAMMA (195) and I'll let you guess the rest but my next choice left 43 words, and I survived with only 4 words possible.

The rules not letting use a letter you know isn't in the target word drastically cuts your choices, your best bet is to use as few unique letters per word as you can, and as uncommon letters as you can, but as all normal words need vowels you'll be forced into only picking a vowel from the target word soon enough. Try to find letters that are in the word as late as possible so you're not locked into having to use them.

Once you are forced to use letters from the target word, avoid placing them in the right place. Sadly there's a rule not letting you use a known letter more than once in a word (once A is known, you can't write ALPHA), and a rule for not letting you put a known letter in a place you know it doesn't go (so after MAMMA, you can't have HALVE because you know there's not an A in second place, nor ALPHA because you know there's not an A in fifth place).

SkiFire131 day ago
> Sadly there's a rule not letting you use a known letter more than once in a word (once A is known, you can't write ALPHA)

This is not entirely correct (or at least it's worded a bit weirdly).

If you know that A goes in a certain place you can still try a word using A more than once. It's only once you know that A does not appear twice (because you tried a word containing A twice, and the second A way gray!) then you can no longer use A twice.

In your case you tried MAMMA which contained 2 As and the second one gave you the information that there's no second A.

gpvosabout 23 hours ago
Are there no words with the same letter three or more times?
forbiddenvoidabout 22 hours ago
If there was a second of the same letter, but in the wrong place, it would be yellow. If it's gray, that means there is no repetition of that letter. So once you've seen that the second one is gray, you have the information you need to know that letter is not repeated.
eptcykaabout 7 hours ago
How many times do distinct letters appear in the word mamma? Do not write code to produce an answer.
fwipabout 21 hours ago
Mamma has 3 M's.
jibalabout 10 hours ago
There obviously are, e.g., mamma.

What was the point in asking this (irrelevant) question?

stirfishabout 22 hours ago
Grepping /usr/share/dict/words shows 110 words that have five letters and the same letter 3 or more times, e.g. sassy, added, daddy, nanny, melee, levee, mummy
amiga3861 day ago
The best I could do with today's word, and the wordlist, but no scoring function to minmax the rules:

- FUFFY (8159) (shipping of Faith and Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

- IMMIX (4544) (to mix or blend)

- ZOCCO (2142) (low plinth, from the Italian word for sock)

- QAJAQ (530) (alternative form of kayak)

- TRATT (155) (clipping of trattoria)

- KHAPH (7) (alternative form of khaf, the 11th letter of the Hebrew alphabet)

I get the feeling that if this game had 7 steps instead of 6, it would almost always be impossible.

ErikCorryabout 22 hours ago
Theoretically, you could still win today's if there were 8 steps. The ninth is the word you have to avoid.

I haven't found a way to win today with 9 steps.

https://gist.github.com/erikcorry/b21723a0ba49c044b03a6030dc...

Edit: Using some of your words you can get to 9 steps (10 including the word you have to avoid): https://gist.github.com/erikcorry/d55d263b129eb7a56c8c212296...

Lerc1 day ago
I had two word possibilities left at the end, so it's possible.
gowld1 day ago
> Sadly there's a rule not letting you use a known letter more than once in a word (once A is known, you can't write ALPHA),

That rule doesn't make sense.

What if the answer is AORTA, and you want to guess ALBUM and then ALPHA?

amiga3861 day ago
The sibling comment pointed it out; MAMMA is revealed with one yellow A and one grey A, meaning it has told you there's only one A. If the answer was AORTA, then both As in MAMMA would be yellow.
dylan6041 day ago
> If the answer was AORTA, then both As in MAMMA would be yellow

Why would the last A be yellow and not green? It's the correct letter in the correct location. MAMMA should be gray, yellow, gray, gray, green.

Angostura1 day ago
If you enjoy clicking things you can spend hours in their cookie consent boxes untickinv the several hundred individual ‘legitimate interest’ tick boxes for individual vendors
wlesieutre1 day ago
Only hundreds? I ended up on Thingiverse by accident yesterday it’s

  RESPONSIBLE USE OF YOUR DATA
  We and our 1022 partners…
thi21 day ago
No reject all button means a closed tab.
mherdelightabout 9 hours ago
It's not like a "reject all" button actually rejects all. They get to decide what "reject all" means in the, well, popup that you just rejected.
gear54rus1 day ago
Ublock seems to work with this one.
dec0dedab0de1 day ago
Yeah, I didn't even see the popup
coldpie1 day ago
It's your browser's job to protect you, not the website's. There's no guarantee that a "reject all" button does anything, anyway. Instead, just dismiss the banner however and clear the site's cookies in the browser when you're done. On Firefox, you can clear your cookies in 3 clicks, use the little button on the left side of the URL bar and hit "Clear cookies and site data" and then Confirm.
pyrale1 day ago
Cookie consent usually also covers fingerprinting. Clearing cookies won't protect you from that, not giving your consent may in some jurisdictions.
coldpie1 day ago
Has that ever been enforced? I don't see any real reason to trust that clicking on a div actually does anything.
tedmiston1 day ago
*browser extensions' job
dontwordleabout 22 hours ago
Wow I can't believe this showed up on the front page years later. That's fun! I am still new to using Google AdSense and am enjoying the wrath of HN on this thread! Hope everyone can still enjoy the game today. Thank you for the feedback!
flexie1 day ago
We are asked to allow hundreds of cookies, not just a few, to play the game.
Madmallard1 day ago
yes top of hacker news and loaded with tracking information and a popular game so likely to garner lots of attention
inigyou1 day ago
What website isn't?

The most shocking part is that Americans care about appearing to follow GDPR, for some reason. For example, HN blatantly doesn't comply and doesn't plan to.

snowwrestler1 day ago
There are now some U.S. state laws that impose requirements for notice and consent.
VonGallifrey1 day ago
> HN blatantly doesn't comply

What about HN doesn't comply with GDPR? It does not seem to have tracking cookies.

markkat1 day ago
Nice. I play Last Word daily.

https://dragonfjord.com/lastword/

It's the same goal, but everyone starts with the same word each day, which does not include any letters in the "last word".

No undos in Last Word. My average is 8.7 letters. Really hoping to get it to 9.

hollylawly1 day ago
Of course the one time I get it in 2 guesses is in this version
zaikabout 5 hours ago
My first guess got 3green+2gray. Should have undone immediately.
bonzini1 day ago
Got to the sixth attempt, 2 words remaining, of course I picked the right one.
stavros1 day ago
I picked the right one out of twelve.
amiga3861 day ago
Having 12 options possible on the last guess is actually very good.
skeritabout 7 hours ago
What the hell, same here. My initial guess was "CELLO", from there on I had 32 other possible words and somehow I got the right one?
rylando1 day ago
Well this sure makes Wordle feel a lot easier!
whoisnjogu1 day ago
and I still can't believe it took me more than 3 guesses
MarioManabout 21 hours ago
In the same vein, last year I took on a good old fashioned optimization problem for Worlde. Given a guess list and answer list, find all of the “perfectly bad” Worlde games in the shortest time. This means never reusing letters or finding any of the letters in the word. I got it from over 35 hours down to a mere 20 seconds.

Results and code here: https://github.com/SMarioMan/worst-wordle

huhtenberg1 day ago
Some of the suggested plays for yellow EA and green H after the first guess:

    ALMEH
    BEKAH
    BELAH
    DEASH
    OBEAH
    SELAH
Not much fun to play with a dictionary like this :-/
pimlottc1 day ago
And yet it didn’t accept JORTS :/
MarkusQ1 day ago
I can respect finding JORTS unacceptable.
taneqabout 18 hours ago
Many places don’t accept jorts. :P
NikolaNovak1 day ago
Like it, but would love a "No Undo" option, or at least, "don't force undo".

My friends and I share our wordle results daily. Would like to add this, but so that if you guess in three or four tries, that's OK, that's just your score for the day. Right now game forces me to undo if I have reduced option space to fewer words than there are remaining guesses, and that's quite annoying for how we'd want to play :)

weedfroglozengeabout 14 hours ago
This game got surprisingly big for what once was an LLM prompt "Create an opposite version of wordle and throw AdSense on it"
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gcrabout 16 hours ago
This is great!

A couple years ago I adapted a quite similar concept for the PUCO 8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=106664 My version allowed players to re-use letters though. Yours is much more interesting and challenging.

I remember being pretty proud of my compression system that let me fit several thousands of words on the cartridge.

grocery_stores1 day ago
One thing I find odd about the rules: it forces you to respect what you've learned via green or yellow tiles, but not gray tiles. The spirit of the rules suggests once you've learned a letter is not in the word, you shouldn't be able to reuse that letter. Perhaps that would simply make the game too difficult, though.
kevsim1 day ago
It didn't let me guess things that had already been eliminated with gray tiles.
ChrisRR1 day ago
Isn't that rule 3?
pbronez1 day ago
It does - you can type them but it rejects the word when you submit it.

I think this DOES make it way harder than regular wordle.

dangabout 23 hours ago
Related:

Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31572258 - May 2022 (236 comments)

anactofgodabout 10 hours ago
FLAIL (232) --> CLEVE (24) --> CLUMP (4) --> CLOUS (3) --> CLOUD (2) --> CLOUR (1)

12 unused letters + 1 words remaining = No margin for error

steinvakt21 day ago
Cool. Surprisingly difficult. I made an art game inspired by wordle some years ago. My dad and I still play it daily. https://artle.eu
lucideer1 day ago
I tried playing this as if its wordle & got it in 2 guesses. How do they do this ??? That's next to impossible in wordle & the probalities seem like they should be the same?
tedmiston1 day ago
By playing Wordle well, you are essentially eliminating as much unknown words as possible each turn, e.g., SALET alone takes 12974 words down to 34 here today.

But this is like Wordle hard mode with the forced letters, so the optimal strategy is probably to invert and eliminate as little words as possible each turn.

I got pretty far here using weird words, but PIZZA turned out to be a terrible first guess for Don't Wordle (eliminating ~75% of the words):

    *      12974
    PIZZA   3169
    AQUAS    290
    SAWED     17
    MEASE      7
    LEASH      0
lucideerabout 24 hours ago
Wordle hard mode (which I play) generally limits you to a similar degree as this game - it's less strict programmatically, but anyone willingly opting into hard mode is likely following the same rules as are enforced here.

So it should be the same.

(assuming here that you're deliberately attempting to lose this game).

quietbritishjim1 day ago
I think you really did just get lucky. It does pick a word up front at the start.
f2474l1 day ago
The game is cheating I guess
zuunaabout 7 hours ago
I love wordle and dontwordle. What I love more is Poople.io.
gpvosabout 23 hours ago
It took me a minute to find out that I needed to close the instructions to see the actual game. A Play button would have been nice.
apparentabout 15 hours ago
Pretty cool. I wonder at what point it makes sense to actually try to guess what the actual word is and then figure out which words you should guess in order to avoid it.
Murfalo1 day ago

    *      12974
    QAJAQ   1979
    PZAZZ    861
    OBANG    449
    URARI    232
    FLAFF     58
    DWALM     10
(totally didn't cheat: https://github.com/murfalo/dontwordle-assistant)
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netsharc1 day ago
I'd enjoy it if the rules with some graphics are displayed near the game, for newbies.

e.g. show a word with some green letters and that they have to be in the same spot in the other word. e.g. FUBAR with green B -> __B__

FUBAR with yellow R -> RRRR_ (with gray background and white R to signify "has to be placed somewhere here")

And for the gray letters, I guess.. show them next to the _____ in a trash can?

embedding-shape1 day ago
This is amazing, and incredible difficult (or I'm terrible), after ~10 minutes I can't even get in a third guess!
nullzzz1 day ago
The ads, the banners. Immediate exit.
theideaofcoffeeabout 24 hours ago
Do you even adblock, bro.
theanonymousone1 day ago
I hope NYT lawyers don't come for you. They did for many other variants of this. Maybe reconsider the name?
lugao1 day ago
Do they go after people using similar names or just any game with similar mechanics?
xigoi1 day ago
IIUC, game mechanics are not copyrightable.
mh-1 day ago
Just the trademark, that I've seen.
noahlt1 day ago
This is a great demonstration of why Wordle’s Hard Mode is actually easier.
calfurisabout 17 hours ago
It puts a floor on the player's skill. That's not the same as being easier. There are game states that are certainly winnable without hard mode rules but do not allow the player to force a win in hard mode.
stanmancan1 day ago
My problem with hard mode is it leaves a lot up to luck. If it was 3 letters and ended in “at” it could be pat, mat, bat, hat, cat, rat, sat, etc. so all you can do is to pick one and hope for the best.
catocabout 22 hours ago
I had to deny hundreds of tracking “partners” wanting to place cookies - without a ‘reject all’ option - before I could even access the website…

So Don’t Access Don’t Wordle

MDTHLN1 day ago
This is quite fun, but I can’t believe the amount of cookies it wants to set!
whstl1 day ago
I had my ad blocker turned off temporarily and it was a strange experience.
seeking_futureabout 16 hours ago
hmm, if you quote unquote must use the letters locked in from the previous example, then they should be brought down to the previous row and locked in by default no? a robot could have fixed that for lessthan 5000 tokens i bet.
tfrancisl1 day ago
Clicked expecting commentary on why playing NYTs wordle, and perhaps other games, was problematic for some reason. Found a game instead.
Folcon1 day ago
Is the word list complete?

I tried WEIRD and it rejected it as not a word

zabzonk1 day ago
that "i before e except after c" rule often gets taken too seriously
LuminousWzrd1 day ago
Oh I've messed that one up before
bigfishrunning1 day ago
i think it's kind of beautiful that weird is a weird word
hnlmorg1 day ago
Isn’t there more exceptions to that rule than there are examples where it’s correct?
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luciana1u1 day ago
finally a game that respects that I already know all five-letter words and would rather be told not to use them
rhplusabout 24 hours ago
I sense this is not winnable for all Wordle dictionary words. Is that provably the case?
dontwordleabout 21 hours ago
There are actually a very large number of solutions for every word. I once wrote an algorithm to enumerate all possible solutions for a given word and I was surprised at the results.
senfiaj1 day ago
You can use hints, after that I could find the right sequence

trash smash abash gnash quash clash

jamesforestwestabout 24 hours ago
Funny idea, it turned out to be a bit more difficult than I thought
HelloUsername1 day ago
(Un)related; does anyone know where to play the non-NYT Wordle version?
teach1 day ago
The original version of Wordle was purchased by the NYT and then Josh took down his copy, so there's no canonical "non-NYT" version anymore.
dec0dedab0de1 day ago
I'm sure someone has the original saved somewhere, I had it on an old work computer.
mda1 day ago
I see that terrible cookie permission window (62 legitimate interest) and I close the window,
lugao1 day ago
It is too hard to be fun :P
intrasight1 day ago
What does "you have already eliminated the letter T" mean?
codechicago2771 day ago
You already guessed a word that had a “T” in it, and the game confirmed that “T” is not in the word. So you can’t guess another word with a “T”.
astura1 day ago
The word doesn't contain the letter T.

It means you previously guessed a word with T in it and it wasn't marked at green (correct spot) or yellow (word contains letter in different spot).

mryingsterabout 24 hours ago
Dang it. I accidentally got the word in two!!!
Velocifyerabout 21 hours ago
Why is the word “satan” not allowed?
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thomastjefferyabout 23 hours ago
Unfortunately, my goto starter word is 4 green letters.

It's pretty frustrating to immediately lose, and then have to undo to find out what the word was.

teo_zeroabout 21 hours ago
If your first word is four greens it's actually pretty good: you get to know four letters to avoid with just one undo!
thomastjefferyabout 19 hours ago
Sure, but if you count undo as a partial game over (which is heavily implied), it's better to just be able to see what the word is and move on.
teo_zeroabout 10 hours ago
> count undo as a partial game over

Not at all. Contrary to other games where undos are cheating, here they are part of the game. Without them it would be 80% luck and only 20% strategy.

> which is heavily implied

I can't find anything that implies this. It explicitly says:

> This uses undos deliberately rather than only as an emergency

while avoiding undos is mentioned at the end as "The Purist approach", which I read as slightly mocking.

I see it like a chess problem where you have to find the best sequence of moves, so you start off with an intial move, then backtrack, explore another idea, etc. Not like a chess match where of course you cannot undo any move.

tantalor1 day ago
(meta comment) the chit chat about cookies is off topic and pointless
JoshTriplett1 day ago
Disappointing that this seems to only be a "daily" game, and not have a "just play" mode that uses random words. First thing that I look for with any game that presents itself as "daily" is "where's the non-daily mode".
doctorpanglossabout 24 hours ago
Legitimately a much better game than actual Wordle.
phren0logy1 day ago
Be happ-ole? (Insert whistling)
wafflebotabout 22 hours ago
got it on 2nd turn. I am terrible at this.
skeritabout 6 hours ago
So including me, you're like the fourth person in this section to get it on the second turn. That's peculiar.
massimodeluisa1 day ago
Ahahhaha funny! xD
burnt-resistor1 day ago
The goal isn't explained clearly and simply enough.
pasc18781 day ago
The goal is to get mony from clicks in "legitimate interest"

What is legitimate here. You and the site why does any third party have an interest?