Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
vaghetti.dev
vaghetti.dev
You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from.
The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involved in making you play one game per day, no server side calls are involved in gameplay at all. And yes, this means that changing your time zone will let you play tomorrow's game, and that you can just view source to know tomorrow's word - it appears right after today's word in the code.
This is so counter to how we usually design software in so many ways, it's just delightful.
I hope it inspires future devs to let go of feeling like they absolutely need to beg or require users to create accounts to capture email addresses just so they have a chance at monetizing their thing. Wordle may not have ever caught on if it were preemptively over-engineered: it could've added friction to the onboarding, the site could crash, etc.
You can just build a great MVP and let it loose into the world, then see what happens.
I'm looking at you, Postman!
In the same space, i love how Telerik kept Fiddler Classic useable!
In order to use a websocket connection with postman you need to be signed into postman. I would love to switch to something else, unfortunately postman is the only tool I know which has built-in debugging tools for socket.io
Same with Docker Desktop. I tried to use it for personal use a few weeks ago and couldn't figure out how to docker build a container anymore on WSL, then tried on native Windows and it was jabbering on about HyperV prereq and I just uninstalled it and went back to WSL for traditional package management.
I think Docker shot themselves in the foot.
But everyone on HN is telling me that I should move away from client side and render everything server side! In fact, all state should be server side! Use a fancy library that opens a web socket and turn the users 4+core computer into a mindless zombie controlled by a .25CPU VM somewhere.
/s
Because web servers are really good at serving up static files.
That is it. I get to make an app, deliver it through the web, and not worry about server resources. I do have to worry about making the app not suck, but as a software engineer I should always be worrying about that! Web, mobile, desktop, making code not a bloated mess is kind of important no matter where it is running.
And if the visitor abandons the site their data will just be garbage-collected after a while.
After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. What makes it fun to spend 10 minutes on the game is that it's the only round of the day so there's a pay-off to giving it some thought. When you can keep playing new rounds, it's just not rewarding and I would just close the tab when I was stumped.
Had I invented Wordle, I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day which is surely one of the critical elements of its success.
Absolutely. If that limitation wasn't there, the game would've definitely fizzled out within days and maybe even never made to it the popularity it has now. The slow sustained popularity, with people posting their results on the shared daily word is the key to success here.
It's the only reason people are still talking about it more than a month later.
But that also made it possible for them to succumb to mainstream fan culture, the cult of the badass and so on, they wanted to ride the attention wave :(
But I can appreciate that one shared round was key to Wordle being noticed.
But I only place the official once a day. I suck at it I think, but they do a great job of making it rewarding.
Also their continuous improvement on the front end is a daily side game, to see what they changed today.
This is the core mechanic of a newspaper crossword (or the NYT Spelling Bee) which inspired Wordle. It’s really no surprise when you think of it that way.
They don't do it to avoid burnout, they do it as a payment gate-keeper: you have to pay to progress in any meaningful way.
It's probably the same with Twitter's char limit.
It's different anyway, but how are people building routines around remembering to visit a certain website once a day? Do they just see the shares on Twitter and remember to go play themselves? Do they bookmark it? I certainly can't build a routine around a novelty like Wordle.
When I went to play the next day's game, it acted like I had already solved the puzzle at midnight. I had to manually edit localStorage to fix my state (or presumably skip a game).
This was when it was still hosted on Josh's site, but be weary of changing TZs to get other day's puzzles. The game might get confused.
The game does, however, use local storage to keep your score, and progress along today’s puzzle.
It's letting go of notions of what makes good code. I had a Moment like that doing Pico-8, since you can only fit 40 or so characters on screen, all the tutorials just use dirty, single or two letter variable names, and since everything is small and you learn a few neat tricks about variables (velocity, coordinates, the mod operator), the code can be really compact... and filthy. It's great.
Imagine not implementing blocking walls in Counter Strike, "just don't walk through walls, it would make the game less fun and why would you ruin the experience for yourself like that?".
This is a case where not hiding the word list was done because it was easier to implement Wordle this way. Engineering-wise, it's not elegant, it's a cop-out.
Client side dictionary isn’t a cop out at all. It’s a terrific solution for a single player game that helps keep the code base elegant.
Well, cheating is less important than in Counter Strike, but not entirely unimportant either. Playing Wordle has a social component.
I think this solution is neither elegant nor terrific. It's simply completely ignoring the problem and claiming that it doesn't matter anyway. I obviously disagree.
PS: when I was a kid, I learned programming on my C64 with BASIC. Like many kids, the first programs I wrote were "guess the thing" kind of games. Usually "guess the number", but occasionally "guess the word". Even back then I understood that hardcoding the word in the program listing was less than ideal, but I just didn't know how to do better. Let's say that 8-year old me would not have been positively impressed if told that Wordle had the "elegant" solution of storing the list of words in its source code.
It's just the default of "I decided not to tackle this problem because it's hard and not a priority for my design". This was also what I defaulted to with my C64 BASIC games when I was a kid, "I don't know how to hide this, so I won't".
...and it's trust model extends there too. It copies your "Achievements" into your paste buffer and you paste them to share. One could easily edit their results, but they'd be cheating themselves too. There's not need for technical restrictions on a player ruining their own satisfaction.
My wordle doesn't get worse from you cheating, but my game of CS sure would.
"I don't need to implement wall blocking, the player should just refrain from walking through walls". It's not elegant, it's lazy.
Single player games included cheatcodes hard-coded in them since forever. Those that didn't had "trainers" which fiddled with game memory with the same effect. Howver, invincibility and infinite ammo tend to ruin the game for most people.
What would you change specifically? Adding an API call backed by servers / lambdas? The creator mentioned it costs in the tens of dollars per month to run wordle for 10s of millions of daily players. Having to run servers would not only add a ton of cost, but now be vulnerable to latency spikes, ddos, downtime.
Wordle scaled to 10s of millions in a few months, without any latency or downtime. Pretty elegant in my book.
I understand that the costs might be an issue, but this doesn't make the solution "elegant". This is the kind of code I wrote as an 8-year old in BASIC, like I mentioned elsewhere, and even my young self understood back then it wasn't a satisfying solution, I just didn't know how to hide secret literals.
I mean, I enjoy Wordle as much as the next person, but let's not make it into some engineering achievement when it's clearly not one.
I'd argue that it's not. Puzzles in the newspapers also don't hide secrets, the answers are on the next page or upside down. And for wordle, the vast majority of players don't even know the solutions can be found in the source (because they don't know what that means), and most of the ones who do know that don't look anyway because otherwise what's the point of playing.
Having the solutions viewable client side may not be engineering elegance, but in this case I do think it is product elegance.
Adding the DB or servers you mentioned would mean costs continue to increase with # of users, which would then create pressure to figure out how to make money off of wordle. Then comes logins, ads, or at the very least donation requests
Oh, you got me there! Definitely wouldn't want that to happen.
You make good points. It's true the solution to newspaper crosswords is usually on the same page, upside down.
1. It's not trivial but it's not that hard if you have a decent vocabulary and some intuitive sense for word frequencies (and word pair frequencies) for different locations in a word. The answer list does not seem to include really hard words as naively picking all the words in the MW dictionary would be. It's a fun 10-15 minute puzzle.
2. Five letter seems like something of a sweet spot.
3. The answer word list does not appear to have a lot of plurals or common vowel endings for past tense, etc. Or obscure words.
4. It lends itself to what I'll casual cheating, i.e. there are easy ways to get some hints without giving the answers away while focusing on a strategy.
5. Basically, it's got good gameplay for a casual game. It would be easy to build something along similar lines that didn't have as fun gameplay for a casual gamer.
How many people don't play the NYT Sunday Crossword b/c they never get more than a few words? There is a very devoted fan base for crossword, but it's not as universal as Wordl's adoption.
To me, that's the genius - just hard enough, but not too hard. It's not a Scrabble competition, it's a fun diversion and shared challenge to experience with your friends.
But, yeah, I like Wordle and it hits a sweet spot for me.
At its core, Scrabble is just a game of probability, memory, spatial awareness, and pattern recognition. The words could be random collections of symbols.
ANESTRI is a very uncommon word by most “normal” measures (it’s the plural of anestrus, a period of sexual dormancy) but it’s (among) the most likely (by probability) 7-letter word played in tournament Scrabble games — there’s something like 9 anagrams of ANESTRI.
As paulcole says about chess, "the better player nearly always wins," and that's a problem when the only way to win is to turn the game into an obsession or a career. A big part of Wordle's appeal is that a reasonable vocabulary, and not a savant-level one, is all you need to bring to the table.
I was an English major in college and got hooked on Scrabble after reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, a sportswriter from The Wall Street Journal. I’d always been into gambling and games with a luck factor like poker, backgammon, cribbage, etc., so that might have something to do with it. Always hated chess because the better player (nearly) always wins.
Scrabble’s an interesting game but unless you’re very talented at anagramming and have a good memory, it’s a bit of a slog to learn enough of the “rules” of the game (the words) to make it really fun. At my “peak”, I was studying 20 or so hours a week and wasn’t even making progress anymore, just maintaining the stuff I’d already learned.
It was a way to pass a few years of my life. I traveled around to tournaments, sometimes won enough to break even, met some interesting weirdos, and had a good enough time. But one day I just had enough and put it down and never picked it up again. Just stopped thinking it was fun, I guess.
Biggest thing I took away from it was really seeing how a few minutes (and eventually a few hours) of work a day could help you change how your brain works and how you see the world. I vividly remember one day at work I saw a guy whose name badge said Demetrius. I instantly thought “oh if you add a ‘u’ to his name and rearrange the letters it spells ‘deuteriums.’”
Now, when I think something is too hard or too big to accomplish, I think about that and just start chipping away.
Eddie L. at the Portland club got me into distance running and that’s been my main hobby the past decade or so. I’ve gotten really into the NYT Crossword and Spelling Bee, too.
I’ll check out the site!
The NYT Crossword Minis is actually really popular within my friend group. It's usually about 8-10 words.
I like this part. I’m in a 5-person group text where we’re posting our scores every day. Sometimes I’m the first, oftentimes not. When I happen to see a couple of others’ results in the thread, I’ll start to think about what they would have guessed with whatever pattern they posted. Like if I see ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ _ ⬛ , and I’m struggling between guessing "CHART" or "CHANT", I’ll go with CHANT because I assume they went with CHART first.
AFAIK his partner actually sifted through all 13k word list and categorized all of them into 3-4 buckets, which is what lead to the final 2.5k answer list.
But then I see the NYT went and removed words like "caulk" and "agora" because they were "obscure", and I feel better about humph.
...I also learned it was used in that classic millennial childhood game Oregon Trail (because you can caulk the wagon to cross the river)
Tbh I can understand never encountering caulk and swill somehow because never did diy or indulge in pig farming or fantasy, but I kinda would have expected "tacit acceptance" to be a common enough phrase if one reads newspapers...
I guess it depends on one's vocabulary, but for non-native speaker it sure does have some obscure words and more importantly technical terms. For example TRUSS. While not exactly an "obscure" word, unless one has familiarity with technical construction terminology non-native speaker most probably is not familiar with such a word. It is just not a word one would expect to appear in a fiction book, film or casual conversation.
So your brain conjures up something happy at the end. You don't slog through the puzzle solving to end up with VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE or other such morose words.
Instead, we get the likes of AWAKE, BLUSH, FOCAL, etc. That helps make the game a mood-stabilizer or even brightener. We're usually clever enough to find a solution most days. When we're slow and need all six turns, we get a cheery "Whew!" to console us. It's a simple, barely noticeable bit of gamification at its nicest.
>So your brain conjures up something happy at the end. You don't slog through the puzzle solving to end up with VIRUS, ENNUI, GRIEF, SLAVE, INANE or other such morose words.
Ironically, SLAVE was actually one of the future solution words in Wordle pre-acquisition. The NYT removed it from the planned solutions.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/15/22934587/wordle-solutions...
That's just silly. And virtue signaling.
The array used to store valid guesses did not contain any of the words from the result array. Both are checked when you make a guess to determine whether it’s a valid guess. Removing a word from the result array also removes it as a valid guess unless it’s added to the other array.
I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt considering they also removed “inoffensive” words like “Agora” and say their removal as valid guesses was unintentional.
And, most importantly: unending riffs on the base meme. There's basically infinite Wordle clones with slightly (or very) different rules. And the shared results themselves can be riffed on as well. It's done a thing that's usually reserved for image memes: it's created a whole new language that people are using to make fun(ny) things.
It's just really interesting to see that happen with a game.
https://www.theverge.com/22914955/threes-2048-ketchapp-copyc...
Is it OK if we like it more because it was born out of love?: ‘Wordle is a love story’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-ga...
And in the space of a month went from ‘introduced in NY Times’ to ‘bought by NY Times’?
‘The New York Times Buys Wordle’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/business/media/new-york-t...
In many ways, I think this is the perfected ideal of what engineer-creators hope for.
The intense focus on making something that feels magical for one - even better that that one is magical to you.
Sharing the creation with a few friends and having them experience the magic too.
And having the world recognize, and then pay $ millions, for your creation done in the name of love.
No years lost in the lab, no fighting with corporate suits to keep ads out, no long marches of ‘growth’ tactics that feel icky.
It is the Romantic Ideal of Engineering.
Does any other story come close?
And better yet he built a career out of doing all of those things and still owns and maintains it years later. Presumably still loves it too.
Dating back since 2013.
So, while it could be created in a short timeframe. A lot of experience/thinking went into it.
Edit: changed 2016 to 2013
What about Mailbox [2013] being shut-down after Dropbox acquisition? [0]
I feel like many of gmail's archive and swipe-shortcuts are heavily inspired by Mailbox.
[0] https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/dropbox-just-killed-mailbo...
It's... really nice? I like to watch it. I suspect I'm not alone, and if the tiles simply changed color in an instant without animation, wordle would not be as successful.
Edit: realized my point seems reductionist. I meant that to be that it is not just a technical marvel. The artistic choices that went into building it are truly impressive.
> A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do, tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input.
He talked about this as the end of a [podcast][2] he was recently the guest on, Syntax
[1]: https://youtu.be/Fy0aCDmgnxg
[2]: https://syntax.fm/show/430/creator-of-wordle-josh-wardle
I wonder how long it will stay that way under NY Times ownership. Just today, I was greeted with a new cookie prompt that covered up the keyboard on mobile Safari and wouldn't disappear without a refresh. Not a good sign of things to come.
I mean sure wordle is fine. But the no-ad and once-a-day features are what the new york times has been doing for years (and yes it works really well). There are probably _thousands_ of other mini games that are no-ad and once-a-day.
The sharing part is pretty cool. It does encourage bragging and probably played a big role in its virality. But yet again, there must be plenty of other games that do that well (and we’ll likely see an awful lot more of them).
Again I do think that wordle is pretty good, but its success is more easily explained by lucky timing and reaching some big influencers early rather than amazingly smart design.
The reason I am posting this is that I think people shouldn’t think that if they build something as good they will have the same success. And I find it a bit dishonest to say “oh of course it had some success, it’s so great” after the fact.
I use this (the second table).
https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfr...
I memorised STARE/TASER, UNLID, CHOMP (all the letters with more than 3% incidence, in a word order with a good letter distribution close enough to the statistical one, and some useful letter groups) and the remaining significant ones(GBFYWKV) and work with that.
If I get a green from the first word I assemble a new word from the letters of the other two; this strategy has seen me guess it in two or three a bit more often.
This may be obvious but in your scenario where there are lots of permutations, it's worth considering that you can solve words two ways -- first by thinking of a word that fits the shape available, and second by carefully thinking of the words with the highest frequency unused letters in all available slots (if there are two or three remaining letters, a guess that is likely to provide you two yellows is vastly better than a guess that will provide you one green).
If you use a three word opening gambit (which you can't do in 'hard' mode) then you'll regularly guess it in four or five, anyway. I strongly suspect that four is the most common number of guesses for good players.
I don't understand the fun in playing easy mode and laying down words just to eliminate letters. I see a lot of people saying that it guarantees them a win in 4 moves, but once I adopted the above strategy I regularly started getting 2s and 3s. Four for me seems just ok, no big deal. At five I start making excuses/blaming the injustices of the game.
... and today I got a 5, so I will be signing the NYT petition, plus my elbow hurts /s
But I do use a start word and as a rule I will try to reuse all the placed letters if I get a single green.
Mind you, I keep frustrating myself because the redirect from powerlanguage.co.uk to the nytimes.com domain is in my browser history and if you accidentally use it again it destroys your stats. Which is fine today of course because I tried to solve it at 5am and didn't get it ;-) but still.
Eventually I will lose interest. Not sure when. A friend of mine pointed me at Sedecordle and I was like, no, not getting into that, and then there I am, addicted to it.
Side note on P, B and C: in terms of five letter words, there are vanishingly few; maybe two or three? PUBIC is the only obvious one.
Then one day, I typed LAUGH and got 5 greens on the first line! Had to happen eventually, but still...
In my experience, Y is rarely difficult to place; it's almost always obvious when you're going to need it.
And you rarely need to think about J at all -- like with Q and Z, it's usually obvious when you need it. (Not many five letter english words have J anywhere apart from the first letter, and the few that do mostly have it in the second, like EJECT, or uncommonly the third, like MAJOR, though it might be more common in loanwords like BIJOU I guess).
Yep, I sometimes follow up with MANIC or PANIC if I've got too few letters, to test for C/P/M/N
And yet…it actually does engage your brain quite a bit! Despite being ultimately very easy, which people find rewarding, the experience feels challenging.
This is an odd combo. I’m having trouble thinking of any other games with this property. It’s more like a word search than a crossword puzzle. It takes work to complete a word search, but everybody has the tools to do it.
It's no different than any other social games. It's still novel, so people don't call it annoying ... yet
I like the idea of sharing everywhere with a picture or emojis, because it means the game has no archive or hall of fame, which means users are incentivized to store it in their social media, which made it more viral. IT's a clever way to escape the limitations of social media platforms. But OTOH without archive or some long-term goal most people will find it pointless and give up soon.
The article seems to imply that wordle is the first game that did all those things. That's not true, each of those elements has been done before, but this game does contain a combination of them.
mechanics are nearly identical to the 1955 pen-and-paper game Jotto and the US television game show Lingo
He had created a similar prototype in 2013, the prototype allowed for endless play, with players able to play puzzles immediately after each other, and its wordlist was unfiltered.
In mid-October 2021, he made it public after it "rapidly became an obsession" with relatives
The game became a viral phenomenon on Twitter in late December 2021, after Wardle added a sharing element to the game, letting users copy their results in the form of a grid of colored square emoji. The feature was inspired by a group of friends from New Zealand
As someone who doesn't play, it's getting more and more annoying. Especially now that there's stuff like Wordle Except It's Four Games At Once demanding space on my social timelines.
The many subtleties of this genre make it a great programming challenge. I encourage developers to try making their own version. I think you'll come away with a healthy respect for Mr. Wardle.
Thanks for the feedback!
I arrived there by looking at the most frequent letters in english from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency and putting them into an anagram solver at https://www.thewordfinder.com/anagram-solver/
There is no five letter word from ETAOI (the five most frequent letters) but there are some from ETAOIN (the top six), namely atone, eatin, entia, oaten, tenia and tinea.
Wordle doesn't recognize most of these, but it does recognize atone
Edit: I just read in a comment, plural or past tense words seem to be less common in the Wordle word set, so my example wouldn't make as much sense.
Wordle is a game that was on the speak and spell in like 1990. It had a different name. It taught me how to spell a lot of words, and especially about patterns of where letters are found.
It was actually my favorite game on the toy at the time, so maybe that says something about it just being a fairly fun game whether you get one word or not... I totally support turning this into an educational game for elementary school kids though, that really seems like how it's a smart game. It teaches you not just spelling but how letters combine, it's amazing.
edit: Let them get addicted to spelling instead of, I dunno, youtube. For adults maybe one a day totally makes sense. For kids? Let them go wild.
Didn't stop people from saying the NYT gentrified the game after tacit came up though, which is it's own commentary on facts and fact finding and confirmation bias
We don't limit ourselves to 5 letter words, and it's really fun when the word is very long. Sometimes it takes a long time to find the word!
A weird issue is finding a list of words that contains every valid French word. It's harder than I thought. I'm not talking about the target words here, but the valid ones that you can use to guess. I thought the 300,000 word list I had found would be good enough, but some pretty basic words such as "Parabolique" are missing. The correct solution would probably be to use a dictionary file instead, instead of a plain list, but I'm not sure there's a python library to parse dictionary files, say the ones from libreoffice.
Also a fun bug was that since I use two completely different lists for the target words and the valid words (the target words list is a list of pretty common French words, it contains ten times fewer words than the valid words list, and it comes from another Internet source), there were words in the target word list but not the valid word list. Due to the order of the checks I do, the target word was deemed incorrect! My friends were certain they had found the correct word, the clues only allowed for one word, but it was rejected again and again. Now I've made sure the target word list is strictly a subset of the bigger list.
Of course, there's no easy way to share it with other people, since it has to be on a shared medium. For anyone else looking for a >5 letter French worldle, check out SUTOM [1]; it took me a while to try it out but the long words are a nice change and the motus sounds are delightful.
Please look again into libreoffice dic files, they're plain ASCII with a number of entries in the first line and you can probably s#/.*## the end of the lines (or maybe expand to include the alternate endings, as you wish).
YES!!
The thing I spent the most time on when coding was to avoid writing code.
* All code takes longer to run than the no-op
* The greatest performance/speed gains are not from optimizing, but from entirely eliminating chunks of code.
* All code is habitat for bugs, the more habitat, the more...
* More code can unnecessarily obfuscate the structure of the app, and ability to reason about it
Some time later, the same principle came up in a seemingly very different field of sportscar racing, when my driving coach asked me "What are the things you do that slow the car down?". I thought of some mistakes I was making, but he pointed me to the big basics - "turning and braking", followed by discussion that the most basic thing to do was to avoid turning and braking. Now obviously, some of both will be needed as soon as you approach the end of the starting straight — the point is to do only the absolute minimum, and that often takes a LOT of work to figure out how to NOT do something.
Same applies for writing code - avoid it at all costs, and write only the absolutely required minimum.
It is effort well spent
For example the choice of your first word matters a lot, should you plane something like ADIEU to get most of the vowels, or should you plane something like CRANE that has a lot of the popular consonants?
And then the biggest mistake I see people make is getting a lot of the letters in the right spot early and then just leaving them there on subsequent guesses. Instead you should be thinking about what types of words can be made with the letters you know about and then what types of whole new words that don't contain any of the letters that you know are correct will give you the most information about the letters you don't know... ideally your first few guesses should contain none of the same letters in order to to maximize the information you gain from each guess.
You may be watching people play hard mode.
Some might say the biggest mistake is not playing on hard mode ;)
> Hard Mode > Any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses
I prefer hardmode as it prevents the sort of elimination strategies, and it feels more like a strategic game. However it does come back to bite you if you get 4 letters early on for a combination that has a lot of possible answers.
I just heard about this game for the first time from this thread, went to play it, and realised this on row #3 after initially wasting row #2. It made me want to go off and write an algorithm (I actually returned to the thread to see if anyone had written anything along those lines).
But I just realised this won't do, because your score depends not only on the last row but on the intervening ones too, so there's a perverse incentive to repeat the successful letters. That works nicely for non-programmers, but it made me think I'd prefer a purer game where the only 'cost function' is based on the correctness of your final guess. Or at least, that game would be quite fascinating to try and write an optimal algorithm for.
Wordle solving is considerably more demanding. It's more like trying to solve a cube in fewest moves. If I would have to compare mindlessness of speed cubing to a word-based activity it would be speed-typing.
Of course, if you pick the right word in 3 tries or less, it's mostly luck. But beyond that, you have to plan a little bit ahead, recognize there are more possibilities than available lines, and act accordingly. That's when the game becomes interesting, and gives a little bit of dopamine. Finding the word in <= 3 tries is nice if you want to brag a bit, but not really satisfying. It's when you finally find it at your 5th or 6th try that it's pleasing.
I'm not color blind but I play with some friends who are, I have to switch color pallets to share results.
in color blind mode its light blue for right letter wrong spot and orange for right letter right spot. mentally, to me this is the wrong war around.. and it drives me nuts and forces mistakes on my end.
I've been playing Quordle, and sometimes it's more insane alternatives [1] [2]. I've also really been enjoying Semantle [3], it's probably one of my favorite and most unique ones. There's other ones that are also need but maybe too much, like Squabble [4] and Squardle [5], but I wouldn't say they've all failed.
Also, to say "the game itself is mediocre at best" seems ridiculous. A mediocre game doesn't get popular purely based on once a day and sharing...
No ads, no log-in so far
[1] https://gist.github.com/coertg/e8d0fc66c3a56a3c3490c77b7f812...
The game's word-size of 5 limits binging. I went back to play some of the first few words and found that I got sick of the game very quickly.
It'd be interesting to hear the creator of Wordle explain their decisions.
It's pretty much a crossword variation.
It's success reminds me of Flappy Bird. It's a mass phenomenon not a great game.
I have a friend who always users yesterdays word as their first guess
I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said.
If you play to enjoy it and don't press "share", well done. If you press "share", be ready to burn in the level of hell reserved for spammers.
Fortunately, the NYT will screw this up and try to monetise it which will destroy its popularity in a short time.