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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

I 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 functionality and how that led to virality on Twitter.

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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.

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.

My friend group doesn't focus on score, we just celebrate getting lucky or lament if we take until the last try.

There is a point about luck taking away from the longevity of the game. Unless the developer adds more game dimensions (in the same minimal, non-intrusive way) I kinda think most people will stop playing in a few months

Of course it's luck based - it's mastermind with a preset number of mnemonic arrangements. I struggle with it too, but the problem with systems thinking is that you don't get to enjoy the magic which drives the fad.

If one must judge performance in this game, then they shouldn't put much weight into the final score. That's why the share game button shows your progression. It tells a story that other players can understand. I learned to guess without using known correct letters by seeing games shared by friends. I know counting theory, I know Bayes, but it still wasn't a strategy I came up with on my own. The game is just something fun to do at a time where that is in short supply.

Put another way:

https://imgur.com/a/AkPPuYH

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

It is much easier to work backwards with that logic than forward. It is impossible to both try to guess the word while also trying to eliminate all possible overlaps that may occur with whatever results you get from the previous word. In this specific instance, I would have never played "image" because my first word was "tears" so I immediately knew there was a t, e, and r. There was no reason to try to determine if there was a g or m until I was presented with "ti_er".

It's only "luck" if you actually know all the words - most people do passively, but can they find the right one actively? That's part of the 'skill'. The other part is constructing a mental graph that allows you to find your way to the correct word within 6 steps, regardless of the word. An interesting question is whether there is actually any luck involved and how much. i.e. What is the optimal graph reducing the luck factor to a minimum, and is there a perfect one, if you know all words in the game?

People who say "it's just luck" either don't know, or don't care - but it's neither a correct, nor a clever position.

I went TIMER, TILER, TIGER and scraped in. I had been getting most in 3-4 attempts prior to that.

The aspect I don’t love is that in forcing dictionary words to be attempted, people can rely on that at the end rather than winning through word knowledge. My 9yo plays it and generally does well but was bailed out once by this.

I attempt to get at the fourth try. Before that is luck, after that is guesswork I like to believe that four is the skill sweet spot.

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