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Comment by convery | Hacker News Reader

I mean, it's literally the 70's game "Mastermind" but with letters instead of colours, so any patents are out the window and copyright is dubious at best..

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There's no copyright to the rules of the game itself, but its implementation as a work of Javascript is certainly copyrightable, in the same way that the manual of a board game is copyrightable.

There may also be a copyright interest in the "target" and "guessable" word lists as collections, but I'm not certain of the applicable subtleties.

And the word list & order is definitely copyrightable. But you could probably argue that a list of historic wordles is a factual data set and thus exempt from copyright.

There is (was?) a Word Mastermind. I have a set. Here’s a picture from the internet: https://jouets-retro.fr/3257-thickbox_default/word-mastermin...

And a TV show in France called Motus since forever.

I don't think that's fair. It might be mastermind to anyone who can't speak English - but the gameplay feels very different (and is: it's not about guessing a random sequence, it's about guessing a word based on clues).

It's much closer to hangman.

I believe they would have only been able to copyright the actual sequence of words, not the mechanics of the game.

Patent a car? 'Tis but a carriage with engine!

Cars famous for being produced by a single company.

Cars or whatever, I claim that's a significant "but"

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