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Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

dontwordle.com

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Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#33
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).

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#34

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.

...unless any of those letters appear in the answer - then you're locked into including them in subsequent guesses!

Even worse if your guess had them in the right location!

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#35
post #2

Absolutely - when they choose ridiculous words like "PATCH". WATCH HATCH BATCH CATCH LATCH MATCH There, I made 6 near-perfect guesses that would have cost me the game if I started with any one of them. This is so infuriating. I've lost I think 3 times already because of this type of word choice. Note : This is only relevant if you play on the hard-mode, which enforces you re-use guessed letters that have already been…

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.

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#36
post #33

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).

Or maybe not, most of them seem not to be valid choices in DontWordle.

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#37
post #2

Absolutely - when they choose ridiculous words like "PATCH". WATCH HATCH BATCH CATCH LATCH MATCH There, I made 6 near-perfect guesses that would have cost me the game if I started with any one of them. This is so infuriating. I've lost I think 3 times already because of this type of word choice. Note : This is only relevant if you play on the hard-mode, which enforces you re-use guessed letters that have already been…

Seems like you need to avoid guesses that can get you trapped like that, and therein lies the extra difficulty, no?

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#39
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.

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