Sharing a Wordle result is the first application of coloured emojis that has been useful to me. Laughing or crying faces and hearts are nice, but don't really offer much over text emoticons like :-), <3 and such. But this method of sharing was not possible before coloured boxes were available as characters.
Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
131–140 of 271 posts
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#132I actually think the OP and the comments are too focused on the programmer-related aspects of this. I'll add a few things. 1. It's not trivial but it's not that hard if you have a decent vocabulary and some intuitive sense for word frequencies (and word pair frequencies) for different locations in a word. The answer list does not seem to include really hard words as naively picking all the words in the MW dictionary…
[deleted]
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I first discovered Wordle, I immediately looked for a way to keep playing with new random words, something that most clones have implemented. After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. What makes it fun to spend 10 minutes on the game is that it's the only round of the day so there's a pay-off to giving it some thought. When you can keep playing new rounds, it's just not rewarding and I would just close the tab…
I have been playing Quordle as well, and now find Wordle very slow and dull. I'll persist as long as my streak is active (60+ or whatever) but bail if it breaks. I play 10-20 games of Quordle a day and find it more interesting, challenging with IMO more difficult words, etc. But I can appreciate that one shared round was key to Wordle being noticed.
quordle seems to be the ideal number of boards, 8 and 16 get too easy because most of the letters show up somewhere and you get into the mopping up phase pretty soon.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The daily bit is clearly modeled off the New York Times daily word puzzles, and it's obvious why the NYT bought it to add it to their collection of daily word games.
The NYT day resets at the same time for everyone though
and I wouldn't be surprised if they change wordle to do that at some point.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I first discovered Wordle, I immediately looked for a way to keep playing with new random words, something that most clones have implemented. After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. What makes it fun to spend 10 minutes on the game is that it's the only round of the day so there's a pay-off to giving it some thought. When you can keep playing new rounds, it's just not rewarding and I would just close the tab…
This mechanic you describe is actually quite common in freemium games. Games like Farmville don’t let you burn yourself out and purposely make you wait and come back hours or days later to get that dope rush.
Don’t they let you pay to bypass that?
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. Absolutely. If that limitation wasn't there, the game would've definitely fizzled out within days and maybe even never made to it the popularity it has now. The slow sustained popularity, with people posting their results on the shared daily word is the key to success here. It's the only reason people are still talking about it more than a month later.
This is also why I strongly prefer the HBO release model to the Netflix model.
For me, the HBO model for Wordle would be one guess a week, and ~6 weeks to complete a game.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
>One more factor in Wordle's popularity that I haven't yet seen commentators identify much. The game's word roster tilts heavily toward words with neutral or cheerful connotations. >So your brain conjures up something happy at the end. You don't slog through the puzzle solving to end up with VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE or other such morose words. Ironically, SLAVE was actually one of the future solution words i…
They removed it from the master dictionary as well.
*primary dictionary
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
The daily bit is clearly modeled off the New York Times daily word puzzles, and it's obvious why the NYT bought it to add it to their collection of daily word games.
The NYT day resets at the same time for everyone though
True, but so long as you play it at roughly the same time every day, you're going to encounter a new puzzle at that time, time zone differences notwithstanding.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#139My friends and I love Wordle. I made a Discord bot that picks a random French word every day at 8 AM and 8 PM, and we guess it in the chat. I added a rule so that you can't make two guesses in a row, in other words players must take turns making guesses, so one person cannot just brute force the game immediately.
We don't limit ourselves to 5 letter words, and it's really fun when the word is very long. Sometimes it takes a long time to find the word!
A weird issue is finding a list of words that contains every valid French word. It's harder than I thought. I'm not talking about the target words here, but the valid ones that you can use to guess. I thought the 300,000 word list I had found would be good enough, but some pretty basic words such as "Parabolique" are missing. The correct solution would probably be to use a dictionary file instead, instead of a plain list, but I'm not sure there's a python library to parse dictionary files, say the ones from libreoffice.
Also a fun bug was that since I use two completely different lists for the target words and the valid words (the target words list is a list of pretty common French words, it contains ten times fewer words than the valid words list, and it comes from another Internet source), there were words in the target word list but not the valid word list. Due to the order of the checks I do, the target word was deemed incorrect! My friends were certain they had found the correct word, the clues only allowed for one word, but it was rejected again and again. Now I've made sure the target word list is strictly a subset of the bigger list.
Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
#140I'm surprised how infrequently I see anyone commenting on the wordle tile-flipping animation. It's... really nice? I like to watch it. I suspect I'm not alone, and if the tiles simply changed color in an instant without animation, wordle would not be as successful.
It's called "juice it or lose it"