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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?

#41

Post by dwringer »

lowkey_ wrote: post #35
ar_lan wrote: 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.

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.

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

#42

Post by testplzignore »

ar_lan wrote: 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…

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.

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

#43

Post by evandale »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #17
andrewflnr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. To each their own.

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.

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

#45

Post by dontwordle »

soneca wrote: post #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.

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.

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

#46

Post by LZ_Khan »

Waterluvian wrote: post #25
ethbr0 wrote: post #9

The essence of any wildly popular single-player game = hard to win quickly + very hard to lose.

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."

Um.. elden ring?

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

#47

Post by DonaldFisk »

ar_lan wrote: 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…

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.

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