12935 -> TIZZY (5625) -> OXBOW (2674) -> GRUFF (858) -> MAMMA (195) and I'll let you guess the rest but my next choice left 43 words, and I survived with only 4 words possible.
The rules not letting use a letter you know isn't in the target word drastically cuts your choices, your best bet is to use as few unique letters per word as you can, and as uncommon letters as you can, but as all normal words need vowels you'll be forced into only picking a vowel from the target word soon enough. Try to find letters that are in the word as late as possible so you're not locked into having to use them.
Once you are forced to use letters from the target word, avoid placing them in the right place. Sadly there's a rule not letting you use a known letter more than once in a word (once A is known, you can't write ALPHA), and a rule for not letting you put a known letter in a place you know it doesn't go (so after MAMMA, you can't have HALVE because you know there's not an A in second place, nor ALPHA because you know there's not an A in fifth place).
SkiFire13 12 hours ago [-]
> Sadly there's a rule not letting you use a known letter more than once in a word (once A is known, you can't write ALPHA)
This is not entirely correct (or at least it's worded a bit weirdly).
If you know that A goes in a certain place you can still try a word using A more than once. It's only once you know that A does not appear twice (because you tried a word containing A twice, and the second A way gray!) then you can no longer use A twice.
In your case you tried MAMMA which contained 2 As and the second one gave you the information that there's no second A.
gpvos 10 hours ago [-]
Are there no words with the same letter three or more times?
forbiddenvoid 9 hours ago [-]
If there was a second of the same letter, but in the wrong place, it would be yellow. If it's gray, that means there is no repetition of that letter. So once you've seen that the second one is gray, you have the information you need to know that letter is not repeated.
fwip 8 hours ago [-]
Mamma has 3 M's.
stirfish 9 hours ago [-]
Grepping /usr/share/dict/words shows 110 words that have five letters and the same letter 3 or more times, e.g. sassy, added, daddy, nanny, melee, levee, mummy
noknownsender 5 hours ago [-]
It also accepted GEESE
amiga386 14 hours ago [-]
The best I could do with today's word, and the wordlist, but no scoring function to minmax the rules:
- FUFFY (8159) (shipping of Faith and Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
- IMMIX (4544) (to mix or blend)
- ZOCCO (2142) (low plinth, from the Italian word for sock)
- QAJAQ (530) (alternative form of kayak)
- TRATT (155) (clipping of trattoria)
- KHAPH (7) (alternative form of khaf, the 11th letter of the Hebrew alphabet)
I get the feeling that if this game had 7 steps instead of 6, it would almost always be impossible.
ErikCorry 9 hours ago [-]
Theoretically, you could still win today's if there were 8 steps. The ninth is the word you have to avoid.
I had two word possibilities left at the end, so it's possible.
gowld 12 hours ago [-]
> Sadly there's a rule not letting you use a known letter more than once in a word (once A is known, you can't write ALPHA),
That rule doesn't make sense.
What if the answer is AORTA, and you want to guess ALBUM and then ALPHA?
amiga386 12 hours ago [-]
The sibling comment pointed it out; MAMMA is revealed with one yellow A and one grey A, meaning it has told you there's only one A. If the answer was AORTA, then both As in MAMMA would be yellow.
dylan604 11 hours ago [-]
> If the answer was AORTA, then both As in MAMMA would be yellow
Why would the last A be yellow and not green? It's the correct letter in the correct location. MAMMA should be gray, yellow, gray, gray, green.
amiga386 8 hours ago [-]
Oops, yes. In that case, if the answer was AGAIN, both As in MAMMA would be yellow (as opposed to one yellow one grey)
Angostura 15 hours ago [-]
If you enjoy clicking things you can spend hours in their cookie consent boxes untickinv the several hundred individual ‘legitimate interest’ tick boxes for individual vendors
wlesieutre 13 hours ago [-]
Only hundreds? I ended up on Thingiverse by accident yesterday it’s
RESPONSIBLE USE OF YOUR DATA
We and our 1022 partners…
thi2 14 hours ago [-]
No reject all button means a closed tab.
coldpie 13 hours ago [-]
It's your browser's job to protect you, not the website's. There's no guarantee that a "reject all" button does anything, anyway. Instead, just dismiss the banner however and clear the site's cookies in the browser when you're done. On Firefox, you can clear your cookies in 3 clicks, use the little button on the left side of the URL bar and hit "Clear cookies and site data" and then Confirm.
pyrale 13 hours ago [-]
Cookie consent usually also covers fingerprinting. Clearing cookies won't protect you from that, not giving your consent may in some jurisdictions.
coldpie 12 hours ago [-]
Has that ever been enforced? I don't see any real reason to trust that clicking on a div actually does anything.
11 hours ago [-]
tedmiston 13 hours ago [-]
*browser extensions' job
gear54rus 15 hours ago [-]
Ublock seems to work with this one.
dec0dedab0de 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I didn't even see the popup
dontwordle 9 hours ago [-]
Wow I can't believe this showed up on the front page years later. That's fun! I am still new to using Google AdSense and am enjoying the wrath of HN on this thread! Hope everyone can still enjoy the game today. Thank you for the feedback!
flexie 15 hours ago [-]
We are asked to allow hundreds of cookies, not just a few, to play the game.
Madmallard 15 hours ago [-]
yes top of hacker news and loaded with tracking information and a popular game so likely to garner lots of attention
inigyou 14 hours ago [-]
What website isn't?
The most shocking part is that Americans care about appearing to follow GDPR, for some reason. For example, HN blatantly doesn't comply and doesn't plan to.
snowwrestler 13 hours ago [-]
There are now some U.S. state laws that impose requirements for notice and consent.
VonGallifrey 14 hours ago [-]
> HN blatantly doesn't comply
What about HN doesn't comply with GDPR? It does not seem to have tracking cookies.
masfuerte 14 hours ago [-]
Apparently they won't delete your old comments if you ask them to.
I'm someone who goes to somewhat absurd lengths to avoid tracking, but HN's policy doesn't bother me because I know the data exists elsewhere and deleting it here won't make a jot of difference to that.
tialaramex 14 hours ago [-]
I'm not entirely sure they'd need to comply. The question is what the purpose of the data being collected was, but seems to me that if you emphasise the whole idea that this is a conversation (which HN does in several ways) then actually "We don't delete comments" is defensible.
If I'm reading a thread about a problem I'm having in a video game on Reddit and it goes "This is very frustrating because I can't get a rabbit to teleport", then a reply which is [deleted] and then "Oh! Thanks so much, I'd never have figured that out" I'm in exactly the same place as the original poster, but now with the additional agony of knowing that there was a correct solution and that it's hard to figure out what it is - ugh.
inigyou 14 hours ago [-]
Right to be forgotten is part of GDPR even though most people only think of cookie banners. There's no one-click export, either.
tialaramex 12 hours ago [-]
Like most of the GDPR "Right to be forgotten" is not an absolute right. As you'll quickly discover when you insist that the bank needs to "forget" that you owe them a lot of money, there are plenty of legitimate reasons they can decline to "forget" you despite your invocation of a "right".
awsglkhj 11 hours ago [-]
That's cute. Your records are yours. Barring some agreement to the contrary, I have no right to mess with them or inspect them, even if they contain information about me.
gpvos 10 hours ago [-]
That's an interesting opinion, but EU law says the opposite.
awsglkhj 10 hours ago [-]
EU law only matters to those subject to it.
inigyou 9 hours ago [-]
Which is why I questioned American websites complying with GDPR, and pointed out that HN doesn't feel any need to.
It's the same goal, but everyone starts with the same word each day, which does not include any letters in the "last word".
No undos in Last Word. My average is 8.7 letters. Really hoping to get it to 9.
weedfroglozenge 1 hours ago [-]
This game got surprisingly big for what once was an LLM prompt "Create an opposite version of wordle and throw AdSense on it"
hollylawly 15 hours ago [-]
Of course the one time I get it in 2 guesses is in this version
bonzini 15 hours ago [-]
Got to the sixth attempt, 2 words remaining, of course I picked the right one.
stavros 15 hours ago [-]
I picked the right one out of twelve.
amiga386 14 hours ago [-]
Having 12 options possible on the last guess is actually very good.
stavros 14 hours ago [-]
It was only my last guess because I lost :P I had three remaining.
rylando 15 hours ago [-]
Well this sure makes Wordle feel a lot easier!
whoisnjogu 15 hours ago [-]
and I still can't believe it took me more than 3 guesses
gcr 3 hours ago [-]
This is great!
A couple years ago I adapted a quite similar concept for the PUCO 8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=106664 My version allowed players to re-use letters though. Yours is much more interesting and challenging.
I remember being pretty proud of my compression system that let me fit several thousands of words on the cartridge.
MarioMan 8 hours ago [-]
In the same vein, last year I took on a good old fashioned optimization problem for Worlde. Given a guess list and answer list, find all of the “perfectly bad” Worlde games in the shortest time. This means never reusing letters or finding any of the letters in the word. I got it from over 35 hours down to a mere 20 seconds.
Pretty cool. I wonder at what point it makes sense to actually try to guess what the actual word is and then figure out which words you should guess in order to avoid it.
NikolaNovak 12 hours ago [-]
Like it, but would love a "No Undo" option, or at least, "don't force undo".
My friends and I share our wordle results daily. Would like to add this, but so that if you guess in three or four tries, that's OK, that's just your score for the day. Right now game forces me to undo if I have reduced option space to fewer words than there are remaining guesses, and that's quite annoying for how we'd want to play :)
huhtenberg 15 hours ago [-]
Some of the suggested plays for yellow EA and green H after the first guess:
ALMEH
BEKAH
BELAH
DEASH
OBEAH
SELAH
Not much fun to play with a dictionary like this :-/
One thing I find odd about the rules: it forces you to respect what you've learned via green or yellow tiles, but not gray tiles. The spirit of the rules suggests once you've learned a letter is not in the word, you shouldn't be able to reuse that letter. Perhaps that would simply make the game too difficult, though.
kevsim 15 hours ago [-]
It didn't let me guess things that had already been eliminated with gray tiles.
ChrisRR 15 hours ago [-]
Isn't that rule 3?
pbronez 15 hours ago [-]
It does - you can type them but it rejects the word when you submit it.
I think this DOES make it way harder than regular wordle.
seeking_future 3 hours ago [-]
hmm, if you quote unquote must use the letters locked in from the previous example, then they should be brought down to the previous row and locked in by default no? a robot could have fixed that for lessthan 5000 tokens i bet.
gpvos 10 hours ago [-]
It took me a minute to find out that I needed to close the instructions to see the actual game. A Play button would have been nice.
steinvakt2 13 hours ago [-]
Cool. Surprisingly difficult. I made an art game inspired by wordle some years ago. My dad and I still play it daily. https://artle.eu
lucideer 15 hours ago [-]
I tried playing this as if its wordle & got it in 2 guesses. How do they do this ??? That's next to impossible in wordle & the probalities seem like they should be the same?
tedmiston 13 hours ago [-]
By playing Wordle well, you are essentially eliminating as much unknown words as possible each turn, e.g., SALET alone takes 12974 words down to 34 here today.
But this is like Wordle hard mode with the forced letters, so the optimal strategy is probably to invert and eliminate as little words as possible each turn.
I got pretty far here using weird words, but PIZZA turned out to be a terrible first guess for Don't Wordle (eliminating ~75% of the words):
Wordle hard mode (which I play) generally limits you to a similar degree as this game - it's less strict programmatically, but anyone willingly opting into hard mode is likely following the same rules as are enforced here.
So it should be the same.
(assuming here that you're deliberately attempting to lose this game).
quietbritishjim 12 hours ago [-]
I think you really did just get lucky. It does pick a word up front at the start.
I'd enjoy it if the rules with some graphics are displayed near the game, for newbies.
e.g. show a word with some green letters and that they have to be in the same spot in the other word. e.g. FUBAR with green B -> __B__
FUBAR with yellow R -> RRRR_ (with gray background and white R to signify "has to be placed somewhere here")
And for the gray letters, I guess.. show them next to the _____ in a trash can?
nullzzz 12 hours ago [-]
The ads, the banners. Immediate exit.
theideaofcoffee 11 hours ago [-]
Do you even adblock, bro.
embedding-shape 15 hours ago [-]
This is amazing, and incredible difficult (or I'm terrible), after ~10 minutes I can't even get in a third guess!
catoc 10 hours ago [-]
I had to deny hundreds of
tracking “partners” wanting to place cookies - without a ‘reject all’ option - before I could even access the website…
So Don’t Access Don’t Wordle
theanonymousone 15 hours ago [-]
I hope NYT lawyers don't come for you. They did for many other variants of this. Maybe reconsider the name?
lugao 15 hours ago [-]
Do they go after people using similar names or just any game with similar mechanics?
xigoi 11 hours ago [-]
IIUC, game mechanics are not copyrightable.
mh- 14 hours ago [-]
Just the trademark, that I've seen.
noahlt 12 hours ago [-]
This is a great demonstration of why Wordle’s Hard Mode is actually easier.
calfuris 4 hours ago [-]
It puts a floor on the player's skill. That's not the same as being easier. There are game states that are certainly winnable without hard mode rules but do not allow the player to force a win in hard mode.
stanmancan 12 hours ago [-]
My problem with hard mode is it leaves a lot up to luck. If it was 3 letters and ended in “at” it could be pat, mat, bat, hat, cat, rat, sat, etc. so all you can do is to pick one and hope for the best.
MDTHLN 15 hours ago [-]
This is quite fun, but I can’t believe the amount of cookies it wants to set!
whstl 15 hours ago [-]
I had my ad blocker turned off temporarily and it was a strange experience.
tfrancisl 12 hours ago [-]
Clicked expecting commentary on why playing NYTs wordle, and perhaps other games, was problematic for some reason. Found a game instead.
Folcon 15 hours ago [-]
Is the word list complete?
I tried WEIRD and it rejected it as not a word
zabzonk 15 hours ago [-]
that "i before e except after c" rule often gets taken too seriously
LuminousWzrd 15 hours ago [-]
Oh I've messed that one up before
bigfishrunning 15 hours ago [-]
i think it's kind of beautiful that weird is a weird word
hnlmorg 14 hours ago [-]
Isn’t there more exceptions to that rule than there are examples where it’s correct?
MarkusQ 14 hours ago [-]
Yep, at least on most static word lists.
It's a fun exercise to try and improve the rule by extending it compared to just switching to "E before I".
xigoi 11 hours ago [-]
Only if you forget the final part, “…when it sounds like ‘ee’”.
hnlmorg 8 hours ago [-]
That’s a recent addendum and is far from universally taught.
rhplus 11 hours ago [-]
I sense this is not winnable for all Wordle dictionary words. Is that provably the case?
dontwordle 8 hours ago [-]
There are actually a very large number of solutions for every word. I once wrote an algorithm to enumerate all possible solutions for a given word and I was surprised at the results.
luciana1u 15 hours ago [-]
finally a game that respects that I already know all five-letter words and would rather be told not to use them
jamesforestwest 11 hours ago [-]
Funny idea, it turned out to be a bit more difficult than I thought
senfiaj 13 hours ago [-]
You can use hints, after that I could find the right sequence
trash
smash
abash
gnash
quash
clash
Velocifyer 8 hours ago [-]
Why is the word “satan” not allowed?
HelloUsername 14 hours ago [-]
(Un)related; does anyone know where to play the non-NYT Wordle version?
teach 13 hours ago [-]
The original version of Wordle was purchased by the NYT and then Josh took down his copy, so there's no canonical "non-NYT" version anymore.
dec0dedab0de 13 hours ago [-]
I'm sure someone has the original saved somewhere, I had it on an old work computer.
mda 15 hours ago [-]
I see that terrible cookie permission window (62 legitimate interest) and I close the window,
mryingster 11 hours ago [-]
Dang it. I accidentally got the word in two!!!
lugao 15 hours ago [-]
It is too hard to be fun :P
intrasight 15 hours ago [-]
What does "you have already eliminated the letter T" mean?
codechicago277 15 hours ago [-]
You already guessed a word that had a “T” in it, and the game confirmed that “T” is not in the word. So you can’t guess another word with a “T”.
astura 15 hours ago [-]
The word doesn't contain the letter T.
It means you previously guessed a word with T in it and it wasn't marked at green (correct spot) or yellow (word contains letter in different spot).
thomastjeffery 10 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, my goto starter word is 4 green letters.
It's pretty frustrating to immediately lose, and then have to undo to find out what the word was.
teo_zero 8 hours ago [-]
If your first word is four greens it's actually pretty good: you get to know four letters to avoid with just one undo!
thomastjeffery 6 hours ago [-]
Sure, but if you count undo as a partial game over (which is heavily implied), it's better to just be able to see what the word is and move on.
JoshTriplett 13 hours ago [-]
Disappointing that this seems to only be a "daily" game, and not have a "just play" mode that uses random words. First thing that I look for with any game that presents itself as "daily" is "where's the non-daily mode".
tantalor 14 hours ago [-]
(meta comment) the chit chat about cookies is off topic and pointless
doctorpangloss 11 hours ago [-]
Legitimately a much better game than actual Wordle.
phren0logy 15 hours ago [-]
Be happ-ole?
(Insert whistling)
wafflebot 9 hours ago [-]
got it on 2nd turn. I am terrible at this.
massimodeluisa 15 hours ago [-]
Ahahhaha funny! xD
GNR_Radio 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
burnt-resistor 15 hours ago [-]
The goal isn't explained clearly and simply enough.
pasc1878 15 hours ago [-]
The goal is to get mony from clicks in "legitimate interest"
What is legitimate here. You and the site why does any third party have an interest?
Rendered at 03:48:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The rules not letting use a letter you know isn't in the target word drastically cuts your choices, your best bet is to use as few unique letters per word as you can, and as uncommon letters as you can, but as all normal words need vowels you'll be forced into only picking a vowel from the target word soon enough. Try to find letters that are in the word as late as possible so you're not locked into having to use them.
Once you are forced to use letters from the target word, avoid placing them in the right place. Sadly there's a rule not letting you use a known letter more than once in a word (once A is known, you can't write ALPHA), and a rule for not letting you put a known letter in a place you know it doesn't go (so after MAMMA, you can't have HALVE because you know there's not an A in second place, nor ALPHA because you know there's not an A in fifth place).
This is not entirely correct (or at least it's worded a bit weirdly).
If you know that A goes in a certain place you can still try a word using A more than once. It's only once you know that A does not appear twice (because you tried a word containing A twice, and the second A way gray!) then you can no longer use A twice.
In your case you tried MAMMA which contained 2 As and the second one gave you the information that there's no second A.
- FUFFY (8159) (shipping of Faith and Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
- IMMIX (4544) (to mix or blend)
- ZOCCO (2142) (low plinth, from the Italian word for sock)
- QAJAQ (530) (alternative form of kayak)
- TRATT (155) (clipping of trattoria)
- KHAPH (7) (alternative form of khaf, the 11th letter of the Hebrew alphabet)
I get the feeling that if this game had 7 steps instead of 6, it would almost always be impossible.
I haven't found a way to win today with 9 steps.
https://gist.github.com/erikcorry/b21723a0ba49c044b03a6030dc...
Edit: Using some of your words you can get to 9 steps (10 including the word you have to avoid): https://gist.github.com/erikcorry/d55d263b129eb7a56c8c212296...
That rule doesn't make sense.
What if the answer is AORTA, and you want to guess ALBUM and then ALPHA?
Why would the last A be yellow and not green? It's the correct letter in the correct location. MAMMA should be gray, yellow, gray, gray, green.
The most shocking part is that Americans care about appearing to follow GDPR, for some reason. For example, HN blatantly doesn't comply and doesn't plan to.
What about HN doesn't comply with GDPR? It does not seem to have tracking cookies.
I'm someone who goes to somewhat absurd lengths to avoid tracking, but HN's policy doesn't bother me because I know the data exists elsewhere and deleting it here won't make a jot of difference to that.
If I'm reading a thread about a problem I'm having in a video game on Reddit and it goes "This is very frustrating because I can't get a rabbit to teleport", then a reply which is [deleted] and then "Oh! Thanks so much, I'd never have figured that out" I'm in exactly the same place as the original poster, but now with the additional agony of knowing that there was a correct solution and that it's hard to figure out what it is - ugh.
https://dragonfjord.com/lastword/
It's the same goal, but everyone starts with the same word each day, which does not include any letters in the "last word".
No undos in Last Word. My average is 8.7 letters. Really hoping to get it to 9.
A couple years ago I adapted a quite similar concept for the PUCO 8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=106664 My version allowed players to re-use letters though. Yours is much more interesting and challenging.
I remember being pretty proud of my compression system that let me fit several thousands of words on the cartridge.
Results and code here: https://github.com/SMarioMan/worst-wordle
My friends and I share our wordle results daily. Would like to add this, but so that if you guess in three or four tries, that's OK, that's just your score for the day. Right now game forces me to undo if I have reduced option space to fewer words than there are remaining guesses, and that's quite annoying for how we'd want to play :)
Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31572258 - May 2022 (236 comments)
I think this DOES make it way harder than regular wordle.
But this is like Wordle hard mode with the forced letters, so the optimal strategy is probably to invert and eliminate as little words as possible each turn.
I got pretty far here using weird words, but PIZZA turned out to be a terrible first guess for Don't Wordle (eliminating ~75% of the words):
So it should be the same.
(assuming here that you're deliberately attempting to lose this game).
e.g. show a word with some green letters and that they have to be in the same spot in the other word. e.g. FUBAR with green B -> __B__
FUBAR with yellow R -> RRRR_ (with gray background and white R to signify "has to be placed somewhere here")
And for the gray letters, I guess.. show them next to the _____ in a trash can?
So Don’t Access Don’t Wordle
I tried WEIRD and it rejected it as not a word
It's a fun exercise to try and improve the rule by extending it compared to just switching to "E before I".
trash smash abash gnash quash clash
It means you previously guessed a word with T in it and it wasn't marked at green (correct spot) or yellow (word contains letter in different spot).
It's pretty frustrating to immediately lose, and then have to undo to find out what the word was.
What is legitimate here. You and the site why does any third party have an interest?