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).
SkiFire13•1 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.
gpvos•about 23 hours ago
Are there no words with the same letter three or more times?
forbiddenvoid•about 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.
eptcyka•about 7 hours ago
How many times do distinct letters appear in the word mamma? Do not write code to produce an answer.
fwip•about 21 hours ago
Mamma has 3 M's.
jibal•about 10 hours ago
There obviously are, e.g., mamma.
What was the point in asking this (irrelevant) question?
stirfish•about 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
amiga386•1 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.
ErikCorry•about 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 had two word possibilities left at the end, so it's possible.
gowld•1 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?
amiga386•1 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.
dylan604•1 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.
Angostura•1 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
wlesieutre•1 day ago
Only hundreds? I ended up on Thingiverse by accident yesterday it’s
RESPONSIBLE USE OF YOUR DATA
We and our 1022 partners…
thi2•1 day ago
No reject all button means a closed tab.
mherdelight•about 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.
gear54rus•1 day ago
Ublock seems to work with this one.
dec0dedab0de•1 day ago
Yeah, I didn't even see the popup
coldpie•1 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.
pyrale•1 day ago
Cookie consent usually also covers fingerprinting. Clearing cookies won't protect you from that, not giving your consent may in some jurisdictions.
coldpie•1 day ago
Has that ever been enforced? I don't see any real reason to trust that clicking on a div actually does anything.
tedmiston•1 day ago
*browser extensions' job
dontwordle•about 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!
flexie•1 day ago
We are asked to allow hundreds of cookies, not just a few, to play the game.
Madmallard•1 day ago
yes top of hacker news and loaded with tracking information and a popular game so likely to garner lots of attention
inigyou•1 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.
snowwrestler•1 day ago
There are now some U.S. state laws that impose requirements for notice and consent.
VonGallifrey•1 day ago
> HN blatantly doesn't comply
What about HN doesn't comply with GDPR? It does not seem to have tracking cookies.
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.
hollylawly•1 day ago
Of course the one time I get it in 2 guesses is in this version
zaik•about 5 hours ago
My first guess got 3green+2gray. Should have undone immediately.
bonzini•1 day ago
Got to the sixth attempt, 2 words remaining, of course I picked the right one.
stavros•1 day ago
I picked the right one out of twelve.
amiga386•1 day ago
Having 12 options possible on the last guess is actually very good.
skerit•about 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?
rylando•1 day ago
Well this sure makes Wordle feel a lot easier!
whoisnjogu•1 day ago
and I still can't believe it took me more than 3 guesses
MarioMan•about 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.
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 :-/
pimlottc•1 day ago
And yet it didn’t accept JORTS :/
MarkusQ•1 day ago
I can respect finding JORTS unacceptable.
taneq•about 18 hours ago
Many places don’t accept jorts. :P
NikolaNovak•1 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 :)
weedfroglozenge•about 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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gcr•about 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_stores•1 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.
kevsim•1 day ago
It didn't let me guess things that had already been eliminated with gray tiles.
ChrisRR•1 day ago
Isn't that rule 3?
pbronez•1 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.
12 unused letters + 1 words remaining = No margin for error
steinvakt2•1 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
lucideer•1 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?
tedmiston•1 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):
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).
quietbritishjim•1 day ago
I think you really did just get lucky. It does pick a word up front at the start.
f2474l•1 day ago
The game is cheating I guess
zuuna•about 7 hours ago
I love wordle and dontwordle. What I love more is Poople.io.
gpvos•about 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.
apparent•about 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.
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-shape•1 day ago
This is amazing, and incredible difficult (or I'm terrible), after ~10 minutes I can't even get in a third guess!
nullzzz•1 day ago
The ads, the banners. Immediate exit.
theideaofcoffee•about 24 hours ago
Do you even adblock, bro.
theanonymousone•1 day ago
I hope NYT lawyers don't come for you. They did for many other variants of this. Maybe reconsider the name?
lugao•1 day ago
Do they go after people using similar names or just any game with similar mechanics?
xigoi•1 day ago
IIUC, game mechanics are not copyrightable.
mh-•1 day ago
Just the trademark, that I've seen.
noahlt•1 day ago
This is a great demonstration of why Wordle’s Hard Mode is actually easier.
calfuris•about 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.
stanmancan•1 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.
catoc•about 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
MDTHLN•1 day ago
This is quite fun, but I can’t believe the amount of cookies it wants to set!
whstl•1 day ago
I had my ad blocker turned off temporarily and it was a strange experience.
seeking_future•about 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.
tfrancisl•1 day ago
Clicked expecting commentary on why playing NYTs wordle, and perhaps other games, was problematic for some reason. Found a game instead.
Folcon•1 day ago
Is the word list complete?
I tried WEIRD and it rejected it as not a word
zabzonk•1 day ago
that "i before e except after c" rule often gets taken too seriously
LuminousWzrd•1 day ago
Oh I've messed that one up before
bigfishrunning•1 day ago
i think it's kind of beautiful that weird is a weird word
hnlmorg•1 day ago
Isn’t there more exceptions to that rule than there are examples where it’s correct?
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luciana1u•1 day ago
finally a game that respects that I already know all five-letter words and would rather be told not to use them
rhplus•about 24 hours ago
I sense this is not winnable for all Wordle dictionary words. Is that provably the case?
dontwordle•about 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.
senfiaj•1 day ago
You can use hints, after that I could find the right sequence
trash
smash
abash
gnash
quash
clash
jamesforestwest•about 24 hours ago
Funny idea, it turned out to be a bit more difficult than I thought
HelloUsername•1 day ago
(Un)related; does anyone know where to play the non-NYT Wordle version?
teach•1 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.
dec0dedab0de•1 day ago
I'm sure someone has the original saved somewhere, I had it on an old work computer.
mda•1 day ago
I see that terrible cookie permission window (62 legitimate interest) and I close the window,
lugao•1 day ago
It is too hard to be fun :P
intrasight•1 day ago
What does "you have already eliminated the letter T" mean?
codechicago277•1 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”.
astura•1 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).
mryingster•about 24 hours ago
Dang it. I accidentally got the word in two!!!
Velocifyer•about 21 hours ago
Why is the word “satan” not allowed?
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thomastjeffery•about 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_zero•about 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!
thomastjeffery•about 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_zero•about 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.
tantalor•1 day ago
(meta comment) the chit chat about cookies is off topic and pointless
JoshTriplett•1 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".
doctorpangloss•about 24 hours ago
Legitimately a much better game than actual Wordle.
phren0logy•1 day ago
Be happ-ole?
(Insert whistling)
wafflebot•about 22 hours ago
got it on 2nd turn. I am terrible at this.
skerit•about 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.
massimodeluisa•1 day ago
Ahahhaha funny! xD
burnt-resistor•1 day ago
The goal isn't explained clearly and simply enough.
pasc1878•1 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?
Discussion (127 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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).
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.
What was the point in asking this (irrelevant) question?
- 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.
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...
That rule doesn't make sense.
What if the answer is AORTA, and you want to guess ALBUM and then ALPHA?
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.
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.
What about HN doesn't comply with GDPR? It does not seem to have tracking cookies.
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.
Results and code here: https://github.com/SMarioMan/worst-wordle
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 :)
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.
I think this DOES make it way harder than regular wordle.
Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31572258 - May 2022 (236 comments)
12 unused letters + 1 words remaining = No margin for error
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):
So it should be the same.
(assuming here that you're deliberately attempting to lose this game).
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?
So Don’t Access Don’t Wordle
I tried WEIRD and it rejected it as not a word
trash smash abash gnash quash clash
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).
It's pretty frustrating to immediately lose, and then have to undo to find out what the word was.
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.
What is legitimate here. You and the site why does any third party have an interest?