Hacker News Reader

Comment by magneticnorth | Hacker News Reader

> The game quickly lost any challenge.

I only play on hard mode for this reason. My next guess must always be a possible answer based on my current information, and that varies the puzzle enough from day to day that I still find it enjoyable to play occasionally.

View on HN

I haven't played wordle much since it was purchased but NYTimes ran a story in the last couple days saying how "Hard mode" is actually easier based on their research. Just throwing it out there as food for thought not in a "gotcha" sort of way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/upshot/wordle-hard-mode.h...

Hard mode forces most people to play smarter than they usually would. I'm not sure if that's the same as being easier. Hard mode is certainly harder for a skilled player, because that player could play normal mode as if it were hard mode but without having to worry about avoiding hard mode traps like _IGHT or SHA_E--if they encounter such a scenario they can just play known-bad words that check several possible solutions at once (e.g. FIRES for _IGHT to check FIGHT/RIGHT/EIGHT/SIGHT).

It's not "easier", it just forces a more guess-efficient strategy.

Yeah, I play on hard mode. I have three words that seem quite unlikely but cover most frequent letters and common patterns, that I use to quickly work through possibilities in my head.

I haven't failed to solve in months and I usually play every day. I only picked it up again a few months ago in search of a little ritual for the morning. Wordle, Parseword and the NY Times Sudoku on Hard mode. Good for 25 minutes of break at some point in the morning.

Until I read some of the comments here, I didn't realize anyone used any other approach with Wordle. A word that doesn't include the known letters is just unnecessarily increasing the number of guesses it takes to solve and doesn't make sense...

Using a fixed set of known words (perhaps with adaptive use based on revealed hits and misses) is cognitively easier than trying to come up with 1) a valid English-language word which 2) fits with the revealed information. If the goal is only to find the actual term, it works quite well.

As others have indicated withing this post, there are other ways to play. I'm not claiming to have found the One True Way, just one that happens to achieve a (usually) successful result.

Does that not lead you to situations where you have to guess the last letter on each round? Or do you choose words to avoid getting trapped in that situation in the first place?

I try to avoid the common traps, but it can be tricky.

I also impose this additional constraint on myself, which the game doesn't enforce, that I can't reuse letters that have been marked gray. Sometimes you just can't think of the next word, or might be tempted to use a gray letter because that way you could get more information from other letters, but I avoid using them.

yes, I do the same thing. I wish there was a way to get the implementation to enforce that rule too so I never accidentally try a word that I already know can't be the answer.

Yes, that does happen occasionally, and it's part of the game for me to try and avoid getting trapped like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com