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

  yesterday at 3:29 PM

  > 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

    yesterday at 5:49 PM

    Are there no words with the same letter three or more times?

    • forbiddenvoid

      yesterday at 6:42 PM

      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

      yesterday at 7:50 PM

      Mamma has 3 M's.

    • stirfish

      yesterday at 6:59 PM

      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

        yesterday at 10:30 PM

        It also accepted GEESE

• amiga386

  yesterday at 2:06 PM

  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

    yesterday at 6:58 PM

    Theoretically, you could still win today's if there were 8 steps. The ninth is the word you have to avoid.

    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...

  • Lerc

    yesterday at 3:37 PM

    I had two word possibilities left at the end, so it's possible.

• gowld

  yesterday at 3:22 PM

  > 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

    yesterday at 3:42 PM

    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

      yesterday at 4:31 PM

      > 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

        yesterday at 7:52 PM

        Oops, yes. In that case, if the answer was AGAIN, both As in MAMMA would be yellow (as opposed to one yellow one grey)

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

  yesterday at 2:24 PM

  Only hundreds? I ended up on Thingiverse by accident yesterday it’s

    RESPONSIBLE USE OF YOUR DATA
    We and our 1022 partners…

• thi2

  yesterday at 1:52 PM

  No reject all button means a closed tab.

• coldpie

  yesterday at 2:30 PM

  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

    yesterday at 2:56 PM

    Cookie consent usually also covers fingerprinting. Clearing cookies won't protect you from that, not giving your consent may in some jurisdictions.

    • coldpie

      yesterday at 3:28 PM

      Has that ever been enforced? I don't see any real reason to trust that clicking on a div actually does anything.

  • yesterday at 4:40 PM

  • tedmiston

    yesterday at 2:48 PM

    *browser extensions' job

• gear54rus

  yesterday at 1:02 PM

  Ublock seems to work with this one.

  • dec0dedab0de

    yesterday at 2:31 PM

    Yeah, I didn't even see the popup

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!

We are asked to allow hundreds of cookies, not just a few, to play the game.

• Madmallard

  yesterday at 1:18 PM

  yes top of hacker news and loaded with tracking information and a popular game so likely to garner lots of attention

  • inigyou

    yesterday at 1:27 PM

    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

      yesterday at 3:02 PM

      There are now some U.S. state laws that impose requirements for notice and consent.

    • VonGallifrey

      yesterday at 1:34 PM

      > HN blatantly doesn't comply

      What about HN doesn't comply with GDPR? It does not seem to have tracking cookies.

      • masfuerte

        yesterday at 2:00 PM

        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

          yesterday at 2:09 PM

          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

            yesterday at 2:12 PM

            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

              yesterday at 3:34 PM

              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

              yesterday at 4:47 PM

              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

                yesterday at 5:54 PM

                That's an interesting opinion, but EU law says the opposite.

                • awsglkhj

                  yesterday at 6:03 PM

                  EU law only matters to those subject to it.

                  • inigyou

                    yesterday at 6:24 PM

                    Which is why I questioned American websites complying with GDPR, and pointed out that HN doesn't feel any need to.

Nice. I play Last Word daily.

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.

Of course the one time I get it in 2 guesses is in this version

• bonzini

  yesterday at 1:00 PM

  Got to the sixth attempt, 2 words remaining, of course I picked the right one.

  • stavros

    yesterday at 1:09 PM

    I picked the right one out of twelve.

    • amiga386

      yesterday at 1:32 PM

      Having 12 options possible on the last guess is actually very good.

      • stavros

        yesterday at 1:35 PM

        It was only my last guess because I lost :P I had three remaining.

Well this sure makes Wordle feel a lot easier!

• whoisnjogu

  yesterday at 12:43 PM

  and I still can't believe it took me more than 3 guesses

This game got surprisingly big for what once was an LLM prompt "Create an opposite version of wordle and throw AdSense on it"

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.

Results and code here: https://github.com/SMarioMan/worst-wordle

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.

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 :)

Some of the suggested plays for yellow EA and green H after the first guess:

    ALMEH
    BEKAH
    BELAH
    DEASH
    OBEAH
    SELAH

• pimlottc

  yesterday at 1:50 PM

  And yet it didn’t accept JORTS :/

  • taneq

    yesterday at 10:48 PM

    Many places don’t accept jorts. :P

  • MarkusQ

    yesterday at 2:05 PM

    I can respect finding JORTS unacceptable.

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.

Related:

Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31572258 - May 2022 (236 comments)

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

  yesterday at 12:42 PM

  It didn't let me guess things that had already been eliminated with gray tiles.

• ChrisRR

  yesterday at 12:43 PM

  Isn't that rule 3?

• pbronez

  yesterday at 12:55 PM

  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.

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

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.

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

  yesterday at 2:53 PM

  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):

      *      12974
      PIZZA   3169
      AQUAS    290
      SAWED     17
      MEASE      7
      LEASH      0

  • lucideer

    yesterday at 4:46 PM

    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

  yesterday at 4:04 PM

  I think you really did just get lucky. It does pick a word up front at the start.

• f2474l

  yesterday at 2:11 PM

  The game is cheating I guess

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.

    *      12974
    QAJAQ   1979
    PZAZZ    861
    OBANG    449
    URARI    232
    FLAFF     58
    DWALM     10

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?

The ads, the banners. Immediate exit.

• theideaofcoffee

  yesterday at 4:49 PM

  Do you even adblock, bro.

This is amazing, and incredible difficult (or I'm terrible), after ~10 minutes I can't even get in a third guess!

I hope NYT lawyers don't come for you. They did for many other variants of this. Maybe reconsider the name?

• lugao

  yesterday at 12:47 PM

  Do they go after people using similar names or just any game with similar mechanics?

  • xigoi

    yesterday at 4:32 PM

    IIUC, game mechanics are not copyrightable.

  • mh-

    yesterday at 2:11 PM

    Just the trademark, that I've seen.

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

This is a great demonstration of why Wordle’s Hard Mode is actually easier.

• calfuris

  yesterday at 11:59 PM

  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

  yesterday at 3:47 PM

  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.

This is quite fun, but I can’t believe the amount of cookies it wants to set!

• whstl

  yesterday at 12:41 PM

  I had my ad blocker turned off temporarily and it was a strange experience.

Clicked expecting commentary on why playing NYTs wordle, and perhaps other games, was problematic for some reason. Found a game instead.

Is the word list complete?

I tried WEIRD and it rejected it as not a word

• zabzonk

  yesterday at 1:08 PM

  that "i before e except after c" rule often gets taken too seriously

  • LuminousWzrd

    yesterday at 1:14 PM

    Oh I've messed that one up before

  • bigfishrunning

    yesterday at 1:17 PM

    i think it's kind of beautiful that weird is a weird word

    • hnlmorg

      yesterday at 1:55 PM

      Isn’t there more exceptions to that rule than there are examples where it’s correct?

      • MarkusQ

        yesterday at 2:08 PM

        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

        yesterday at 4:38 PM

        Only if you forget the final part, “…when it sounds like ‘ee’”.

        • hnlmorg

          yesterday at 7:49 PM

          That’s a recent addendum and is far from universally taught.

I sense this is not winnable for all Wordle dictionary words. Is that provably the case?

• dontwordle

  yesterday at 7:25 PM

  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.

finally a game that respects that I already know all five-letter words and would rather be told not to use them

Funny idea, it turned out to be a bit more difficult than I thought

You can use hints, after that I could find the right sequence

trash smash abash gnash quash clash

(Un)related; does anyone know where to play the non-NYT Wordle version?

• teach

  yesterday at 2:27 PM

  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

    yesterday at 2:32 PM

    I'm sure someone has the original saved somewhere, I had it on an old work computer.

I see that terrible cookie permission window (62 legitimate interest) and I close the window,

Why is the word “satan” not allowed?

It is too hard to be fun :P

What does "you have already eliminated the letter T" mean?

• codechicago277

  yesterday at 1:01 PM

  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

  yesterday at 1:01 PM

  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).

Dang it. I accidentally got the word in two!!!

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

  yesterday at 8:06 PM

  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

    yesterday at 9:32 PM

    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.

(meta comment) the chit chat about cookies is off topic and pointless

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".

Legitimately a much better game than actual Wordle.

Be happ-ole? (Insert whistling)

got it on 2nd turn. I am terrible at this.

Ahahhaha funny! xD

[dead]

The goal isn't explained clearly and simply enough.

• pasc1878

  yesterday at 1:02 PM

  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?