What’s your optimal 5-letter starting word? Mine is HOUSE. It has 3 vowels (including E which is the most frequent in the English language) and S which helps test for plurals.
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Wordle Is a Love Story
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Re: Wordle Is a Love Story
#12I tried this game the last couple of days and I don't get the appeal. There is some skill involved, but there is also a huge amount of luck. For example yesterday I had "ti_er". I guessed "timer" but the actual word was "tiger". That left me with a score of 5 instead of 4. Does that say anything about my skill level as a player? Honestly, this seems to mostly be a marketing success story about the sharing score funct…
The appeal of vocabulary games is that they encourage you to flex your memory. They remind you of words you know that you might not use under normal circumstances.
As for the luck, sure, there's some of that. But you have plenty of guesses to get to the word if you play according to letter frequency, and always maximize the information you'll get out of a guess. Think of it like counting cards. The goal is to shift the odds as much in your favor as possible. Most games are like that. Deterministic, perfect-information games are a just a small subset of games.
Re: Wordle Is a Love Story
#13This has become one of my favorites since I learned about it from NYT. It's more fun if you use the "hard mode" where your next word attempt has to include the right letters/spaces found in the prior try.
Re: Wordle Is a Love Story
#14I tried this game the last couple of days and I don't get the appeal. There is some skill involved, but there is also a huge amount of luck. For example yesterday I had "ti_er". I guessed "timer" but the actual word was "tiger". That left me with a score of 5 instead of 4. Does that say anything about my skill level as a player? Honestly, this seems to mostly be a marketing success story about the sharing score funct…
The appeal of vocabulary games is that they encourage you to flex your memory. They remind you of words you know that you might not use under normal circumstances. As for the luck, sure, there's some of that. But you have plenty of guesses to get to the word if you play according to letter frequency, and always maximize the information you'll get out of a guess. Think of it like counting cards. The goal is to shift t…
But the goal isn't just to complete the puzzle. At least in my social circle, there is much more focus on the score rather than on just completing it. There are other word games that have a much better balance of skill and luck. The NYT Spelling Bee game mentioned in the article is one example.
Re: Wordle Is a Love Story
#15This is an easier version of Bulls & Cows [1] game I played in college during boring classes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulls_and_Cows
I built a version of Bulls and Cows at https://cowbull.co/, mainly for my kids to play. One difference in Wordle is that when there is a match, Wordle shows which letters matched. In Bulls and Cows, it just tells the number of letters which matched, which makes it a bit more difficult in some ways.
Re: Wordle Is a Love Story
#16- Fun
- Simple
- One puzzle a day, and everyone plays the same one so you can share and compare scores
- No account creation, logins, ads, subscriptions, data mining
All the right ingredients for going viral. I just hope the last point stays unchanged.
Re: Wordle Is a Love Story
#17What’s your optimal 5-letter starting word? Mine is HOUSE. It has 3 vowels (including E which is the most frequent in the English language) and S which helps test for plurals.
The optimal starting word is ARISE, as it partitions the possible words most evenly across the different green/yellow/grey colour combinations
Re: Wordle Is a Love Story
#18Tip: don’t look at the source if you don’t want to see the answers (I thought the words might be obfuscated but they’re not)
Re: Wordle Is a Love Story
#19I tried this game the last couple of days and I don't get the appeal. There is some skill involved, but there is also a huge amount of luck. For example yesterday I had "ti_er". I guessed "timer" but the actual word was "tiger". That left me with a score of 5 instead of 4. Does that say anything about my skill level as a player? Honestly, this seems to mostly be a marketing success story about the sharing score funct…
The skill is in not leaving yourself with two words that would both fit. If earlier you had tried a word with both an 'm' and a 'g' such as 'image' you would not have been left in a position where you would have to have a lucky guess
Re: Wordle Is a Love Story
#20What’s your optimal 5-letter starting word? Mine is HOUSE. It has 3 vowels (including E which is the most frequent in the English language) and S which helps test for plurals.
I always begin with PENIS. Maybe not optimal statistically, but emotionally.