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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?

#61

Post by tablespoon »

ghaff wrote: post #19
uxamanda wrote: post #15

After using WordleBot [0] for a few days, it became clear that my last "random" guess was often the only choice left, so from this sense, this anti-wordle seems impossibly hard. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/upshot/wordle-bot.h...

One of the reasons I suspect that Wordle is popular is that it's "calibrated" (word length, number of guesses, don't have to play on hard mode) to almost always be winnable if you have some semblance of a decent English vocabulary and some sense for letter combinations.

> One of the reasons I suspect that Wordle is popular is that it's "calibrated" (word length, number of guesses, don't have to play on hard mode) to almost always be winnable if you have some semblance of a decent English vocabulary and some sense for letter combinations.

Seems like the perfect popular game: be easy enough for most everyone to get, but just hard enough to give a feeling of mastery.

I had a similar feeling when playing Guitar Hero way back. It was pretty easy to get the hang of at a medium level, but it was just hard enough that it felt like an accomplishment. Plus the "output" you got from playing the game well (a complex, professionally played song) was wildly disproportionate to to your inputs (a bit of well-timed button mashing that had a far simpler in structure). The mistakes screwing up the song sealed the illusion of skill.

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

#63

Post by DungZeekFu »

I seem to have found a bug (or the word list is drastically different from Wordle). The game says I have 3 possible words remaining, but every Wordle solver website says I only have 2 (and I only have 2 guesses remaining, so this is the difference between the game being winnable and not). The guesses I used for today were WRITE,BOODY,VOUCH,COMMA (and at this point the only two possible words are FOCAL and LOCAL, but it says that there are 3 possible words).

Another point of confusion is that the first row says 2318 possible words, but there only seem to be 2309 words in the dictionary in the code

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

#64

Post by wfleming »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #46
Waterluvian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From Soft games are, I think, popular with a particular niche precisely because they swim against the tide here.

Even their games, though, although they are famously and genuinely difficult, do try and guide the player to success. They just do it in somewhat subtle ways by trying to kill you a lot. I’ve been watching a let’s play series on YouTube of Dark Souls I & III for a while (“Souls Academy”), and one of things I enjoy about it is how they often talk about what skills particular bosses or game areas are trying to teach you, so that you can be successful with later, harder challenges.

But you’re completely right that these games aren’t “hard not to finish”. They’re extremely hard to finish!

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

#65

Post by ghaff »

dontwordle wrote: post #53

Hello! I am the creator of Don’t Wordle. Really excited to see this took off today. I thought I would share some background about the game, some of the iterations I went through, and some of the future features I would like to add. Background: Like many others, I have been playing Wordle daily. Recently, my Wordle win streak hit 99. I was admittedly very careful with my guesses on Day 100, not wanting to ruin my stre…

>What makes a Wordle square yellow

One thing I had wondered--but not enough to figure out what the code does...

Let's say you enter Mamma for example. And there is one M in the word but in the second position. Which M square does Wordle choose to turn yellow? (But maybe it doesn't matter?) There may be other cases like that as well.

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

#66

Post by gjm11 »

Closely related (meaning: I think it might be exactly the same game): Antiwordle, https://www.antiwordle.com/ .

[EDITED to add:] Not exactly the same; with Antiwordle the idea is just to last as long as you can, rather than having a limit of 6, and it doesn't have undos. Also, UX-wise, I don't think Antiwordle tells you how many possibilities remain (win for Don't Wordle), and it doesn't have such slow tile-flipping animations (win for Antiwordle).

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

#67

Post by brk »

ajjenkins wrote: post #60

It would be nice if there was a Give Up button. I got down to 30 possible words but could not for the life of me think of what they could be. I was craving that “Ohhhhh!!!!!” feeling when you see what the remaining possible words are.

Glad I'm not the only one. Got down to 20 possible words, but could not think of any that were valid choices given the letter/position constraints I had gotten to.

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

#68

Post by moron4hire »

ghaff wrote: post #65
dontwordle wrote: post #53

Hello! I am the creator of Don’t Wordle. Really excited to see this took off today. I thought I would share some background about the game, some of the iterations I went through, and some of the future features I would like to add. Background: Like many others, I have been playing Wordle daily. Recently, my Wordle win streak hit 99. I was admittedly very careful with my guesses on Day 100, not wanting to ruin my stre…

>What makes a Wordle square yellow One thing I had wondered--but not enough to figure out what the code does... Let's say you enter Mamma for example. And there is one M in the word but in the second position. Which M square does Wordle choose to turn yellow? (But maybe it doesn't matter?) There may be other cases like that as well.

From experience, the first M.

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

#69

Post by abofh »

dontwordle wrote: post #53

Hello! I am the creator of Don’t Wordle. Really excited to see this took off today. I thought I would share some background about the game, some of the iterations I went through, and some of the future features I would like to add. Background: Like many others, I have been playing Wordle daily. Recently, my Wordle win streak hit 99. I was admittedly very careful with my guesses on Day 100, not wanting to ruin my stre…

For #4, this is actually frustratingly difficult, but if your constraints are not adding to the complexity, your best bet is to not, and just set your cookies to the domain. But if you like, one approach that would work: - Cert with SAN - CNAME's on the CF distribution - S3 Bucket And the sneaky bit: Use a cloudfront lambda to redirect "wrong" Hosts - comes with a cost, but it's super marginal.

Otherwise, your best approach is sadly a second cloudfront distribution with a different bucket (or bucket path) that just hosts a redirecting index key because you end up fighting stupid AWS design decisions.

Not that I've ever wasted stupid amounts of time on this particular problem...

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

#70

Post by TimTheTinker »

dontwordle wrote: post #53

Hello! I am the creator of Don’t Wordle. Really excited to see this took off today. I thought I would share some background about the game, some of the iterations I went through, and some of the future features I would like to add. Background: Like many others, I have been playing Wordle daily. Recently, my Wordle win streak hit 99. I was admittedly very careful with my guesses on Day 100, not wanting to ruin my stre…

I love the premise! It really pokes fun at how Wordle (and other popular games) are actually pretty hard to lose if you play anywhere above some very low threshold of effort/ability.

> it would also be cool to have a “Valid Solutions Remaining” feature

That would be awesome. I suppose the biggest challenge would be to enumerate possible solutions in tree form to allow DFS or BFS searching.

Thanks for sharing!

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