Hello! I am the creator of Don’t Wordle. Really excited to see this took off today.
I thought I would share some background about the game, some of the iterations I went through, and some of the future features I would like to add.
Background:
Like many others, I have been playing Wordle daily. Recently, my Wordle win streak hit 99. I was admittedly very careful with my guesses on Day 100, not wanting to ruin my streak. Then I began to wonder…even if I wanted to lose intentionally, could I do it? Obviously, I could make intentionally bad guesses, but that would take the fun out of it. So I decided to build Don’t Wordle.
Iterations I have gone through:
The first version of the game was simpler and much worse IMO. I did not display the “Valid Words Remaining” at the top, and there was no concept of “Undos". Initially, I actually displayed the Wordle word at the top throughout the entire game! To be honest, that doesn’t change the difficulty of the game that much. However, given that the spirit of the game is not to guess the Wordle word, it seemed like the right decision to hide it.
I created the “Valid Words Remaining” feature when I realized how challenging the game was. I kept getting stuck and wondering whether there were even any words left besides to Wordle word. When I saw how fast the count shrinks, I felt the game was a lot more interesting.
I then added the concept of “Undos” when I realized the game was still too challenging. It’s particulary lame if you’re playing the game for the first time and you get eliminated after just 1 or 2 guesses.
Current Tech Stack:
-Route53 + Cloudfront + S3 + Create React App
Unexpected challenges:
1. The animations. I obviously copied all the concepts from the original Wordle, but I failed to appreciate the complexity.
2. The nuances of the repeat letter words.
3. What makes a Wordle square yellow? The answer is not so simple
4. Trying to get www.dontwordle.com and dontwordle.com to take you to the same URL (either www.dontwordle.com or dontwordle.com) and still support TLS and only use the tech I mentioned above. I actually still don’t have it working perfectly. I know of a solution, but it’s overly complicated
Features I would like to still add:
1. I have heard from multiple people that it’s annoying how you could get the game in an unwinnable state without realizing it. For example, maybe 20 valid words remain, but there is no valid sequence of words remaining to finish the puzzle. While the “Valid Words Remaining” feature is nice, it would also be cool to have a “Valid Solutions Remaining” feature
2. I would like to build a brute force solver that you can watch attempt to play the game in real-time. I have built something similar for a crossword puzzle and really enjoyed watching the computer try to fill the grid. I think it would be cool to do that same thing with this game.
Question I don’t yet know the answer to:
Do any words exist that would not have a single valid solution in this game?
For #4, this is actually frustratingly difficult, but if your constraints are not adding to the complexity, your best bet is to not, and just set your cookies to the domain. But if you like, one approach that would work:
- Cert with SAN
- CNAME's on the CF distribution
- S3 Bucket
And the sneaky bit: Use a cloudfront lambda to redirect "wrong" Hosts - comes with a cost, but it's super marginal.
Otherwise, your best approach is sadly a second cloudfront distribution with a different bucket (or bucket path) that just hosts a redirecting index key because you end up fighting stupid AWS design decisions.
Not that I've ever wasted stupid amounts of time on this particular problem...
I love the premise! It really pokes fun at how Wordle (and other popular games) are actually pretty hard to lose if you play anywhere above some very low threshold of effort/ability.
> it would also be cool to have a “Valid Solutions Remaining” feature
That would be awesome. I suppose the biggest challenge would be to enumerate possible solutions in tree form to allow DFS or BFS searching.
> 4. Trying to get www.dontwordle.com and dontwordle.com to take you to the same URL (either www.dontwordle.com or dontwordle.com) and still support TLS and only use the tech I mentioned above. I actually still don’t have it working perfectly. I know of a solution, but it’s overly complicated
If you use Cloudfront with an S3 bucket as origin for _dontwordle.com_, just create a second Cloudfront with an S3 Bucket for _www.dontwordle.com_ and enable "static website hosting" to redirect to "dontwordle.com" on the second bucket.
This is really cool! I've wondered about exactly this same thing. Showing the valid solutions remaining would be really neat as well, because I'm really not sure how to interpret valid words remaining or when to use my undos in the current implementation. (If it's too computationally intensive, I would think you could memoize it across all users' games and that should make it feasible).
One other suggestion, is maybe the win condition shouldn't be exactly the same as in wordle. Instead of only allowing one game per day but using undos to make it easier, maybe allow 5 attempts per day instead? As a player I think it's simpler to be able to retry from the beginning if I lose rather than try to figure out the optimal time to use my undo.
Great game. Doesn't it push players towards a strategy of working out the solution 'offline', though?
I mean, you start by playing almost the same as standard Wordle, just to guess the answer, without entering it. Then undo everything. Next, figure out a solution which avoids that word. Finally, type in your entire solution.
This could be a bit grindy, and not in the spirit of the game, but it seems like almost assured to win, or am I wrong?
Edit: If there are fewer undos allowed, this strategy gets more difficult
> What makes a Wordle square yellow? The answer is not so simple
Well, I would say the question is poorly posed. The answer to the question as posed is simple as can be if the guess contains no duplicate letters. But if the guess does contain duplicate letters, the question as posed doesn't necessarily have any answer. It may - if all duplicates should be yellow, or if some of them should be green while all the rest are yellow, there's only one valid way to color the guess. But in the general case, you have some number of green squares, some number of yellow squares, and some number of dead squares, and you can swap yellow for dead without affecting the validity of the coloring.
So the question you should be asking is not "should this square be yellow?" but rather "how many yellow squares should this guess receive?". Then you can just choose appropriate squares to color yellow arbitrarily.
A bug (warning: spoilers): repeated letters don’t work quite right. I have an O at spot 2 thats correct and I had it in the wrong place before. Any word like “XOXOX” reports that O has already been tried in the fourth spot, even though it hasn’t.
One thing I had wondered--but not enough to figure out what the code does...
Let's say you enter Mamma for example. And there is one M in the word but in the second position. Which M square does Wordle choose to turn yellow? (But maybe it doesn't matter?) There may be other cases like that as well.
Thanks for the fun. Your valid words are a very small subset of the English dictionary, why is that? I recently wrote a simple Wordle 'solver' (https://github.com/beyazhilal/wordle-solver) and although my list contains some invalid words like acronyms, when I was searching for the English dictionary words I always got a list of at least 120k+; but you only have 12k! That obviously makes the game impossible to win.
Don't know about Route53 + Cloudfront combination but your #4 challenge would be super simple with a webserver like apache or nginx.
I don’t know if this is a bug or intentional, but playing today, I was eliminated on the last guess when there was a valid word that was not the wordle word. However, I had used that word previously and it had forced an undo. This came as a surprise, because I knew the word was safe and planned the 5th word to leave that word available.
Would it be possible to support high contrast colours? I'm red/green colourblind and find it very hard to distinguish the "right in right place" and "right in wrong place" colours. Thanks!
It would be nice if there was a Give Up button. I got down to 30 possible words but could not for the life of me think of what they could be. I was craving that “Ohhhhh!!!!!” feeling when you see what the remaining possible words are.
Agree on this. Some "give up" button that compares how far you got — for example: 3rd guess × 20 valid words remaining = your score — would make this easier to share and compare with others. Right now it's a fun toy but if you can't play together irl there's not an obvious compare method aside from giving the game state in a text message.
Glad I'm not the only one. Got down to 20 possible words, but could not think of any that were valid choices given the letter/position constraints I had gotten to.
Echo this. Now I am down to 1 possible word, I have no idea what it is, and I just want to know the damn word.
edit: well, I solved it by adding a breakpoint to handleWordFinishedAnimating and printing this.state.targetWord . (The whole game is run in front-end.)
Yeah! That reminds me of something a game dev once taught me about single player games. (paraphrasing) "Almost all AAA titles are impossible _not_ to finish in a reasonable time. The entire challenge of balancing a single player game is to hide all the ways the game holds your hand, while making the player feel responsible for all the times you win."
Sort of. You could argue that Super Mario Bros. is 99.9% losing for most people. But within those losses are little personal victories, like getting past the first Goomba.
I hate games that try to remove all loss, assuming people can't handle it.
An addictive formula is "hard to win entirely + easy to win a little bit"
examples include arcade machines/roguelike, gotcha/lootboxes/gambling, crosswords
psychologists have found that the most effective reinforcement strategy is a combination of continuous and random rewards. For example, in World of Warcraft, enemies have a small amount of gold, but only a chance of carrying a good item.
After using WordleBot [0] for a few days, it became clear that my last "random" guess was often the only choice left, so from this sense, this anti-wordle seems impossibly hard.
One of the reasons I suspect that Wordle is popular is that it's "calibrated" (word length, number of guesses, don't have to play on hard mode) to almost always be winnable if you have some semblance of a decent English vocabulary and some sense for letter combinations.
I seem to have found a bug (or the word list is drastically different from Wordle). The game says I have 3 possible words remaining, but every Wordle solver website says I only have 2 (and I only have 2 guesses remaining, so this is the difference between the game being winnable and not). The guesses I used for today were WRITE,BOODY,VOUCH,COMMA (and at this point the only two possible words are FOCAL and LOCAL, but it says that there are 3 possible words).
Another point of confusion is that the first row says 2318 possible words, but there only seem to be 2309 words in the dictionary in the code
There are two different Wordle word lists--the set of legal guesses (roughly 13k) and the set of words in the solution list (roughly 2k). The latter list is curated to be a set of fair, interesting words, excluding plurals and more obscure words. Most Wordle solvers use knowledge of what words are in the Wordle solution database to pare down the set of "possible words". But with Don't Wordle, the "legal guess" list ends up being the more interesting one to show "remaining possibilities" for.
https://scoredle.com/ is a site that shows possible remaining words using the larger "legal guess" list, so you can see that you could have also guessed "SOCAS".
> Another point of confusion is that the first row says 2318 possible words, but there only seem to be 2309 words in the dictionary in the code
There were 2318 remaining possible words AFTER your first guess, which eliminated ~11k possibilities.
This may be a spoiler somehow, but one of my guesses was ZONAL, which appears to be valid based on what you’ve guessed so far? That could be the 3rd possible word. I don’t know if it’s in the Wordle list or not.
Similar in spirit: Absurdle, [1] which tries to make you lse as hard as it can (instead of choosing a hidden word at first, it keeps track of all valid words compatible with your guesses so far and compares your tries with the remaining ones, choosing the one with less letters in common).
Closely related (meaning: I think it might be exactly the same game): Antiwordle, https://www.antiwordle.com/ .
[EDITED to add:] Not exactly the same; with Antiwordle the idea is just to last as long as you can, rather than having a limit of 6, and it doesn't have undos. Also, UX-wise, I don't think Antiwordle tells you how many possibilities remain (win for Don't Wordle), and it doesn't have such slow tile-flipping animations (win for Antiwordle).
The gameplay is a bit more like antiwordle's hard mode, in that it won't let you play a letter that you've eliminated in a particular column -- e.g. if you guess HELLO and antiwordle tells you you've got one green L and one grey L, you can still play CALLS or ALLOW in antiwordle's easy mode.
Jane street had a puzzle related to this, called eldrow [1], a few months ago.
The gist is you’re trying to find the worst sequence of (hard mode) guesses possible for any word in the wordle set.
Their site shows submissions of up to 16 words and claims 17 is impossible [2]. I’ve been trying to do the same, but have yet to cut the search space enough[3].
Ex: calculating the worst chain for jazzy (with a 1000 word subset of the full word list) took an m1 core 1 hour and resulted in the ten-word chain:
This is an interesting (and hard) game. However, it's not representative of a "perfect" game; players often make choices that are independent of the knowledge that they obtained from their last guess. For example, it's very common to guess the first 1-3 words based on letter frequency and non-overlap vs. always using the results of the previous guess.
So again, overall it's cool, but too hard (for me) to seem fun, and it's a very different game than Wordle even though the primary mechanism is the same.
I lost. Much harder for my poor non-native English speaker vocabulary. On third guess when it said I had 89 options, I couldn’t think of more than one word.
A feedback: the “you lost” screen passes too quickly, I couldn’t read the word of the day.
My uncle, a Scrabble nut, proposed this exact derivative game to me well over a month ago, it's amazing to see ideas emerge in parallel. Feels like "if you've thought of it someone else has already" is more of a Law then a quip at this point.
Seems like the best strategy is to choose words with repeat letters. For example, two great first choices would be LOLLY and SASSY. That's two empty cells that can't be used to guess.
I was able to win by starting with the 3 guesses JUJUS, IMMIX, PZAZZ and going from there. These words were taking from the worst starting words list at https://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best..., which is a great writeup on optimal Wordle strategy.
I figured I want to try words with fewest unique letters so after a couple of my own guesses, Kagi search brought me to https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/37762/five-lett... — I guess going through these hoping for misses should work well as a strategy.
I still failed as I came to a 50-50% chance at the end (I was choosing between "f" and "v" to start the word, got the rest of them right).
It's amazing to experience how this one design change completely ruins the game experience for me. And I really mean that: Totally unexpected before I actually gave it a go. Fascinating.
[+] [-] dontwordle|3 years ago|reply
I thought I would share some background about the game, some of the iterations I went through, and some of the future features I would like to add.
Background: Like many others, I have been playing Wordle daily. Recently, my Wordle win streak hit 99. I was admittedly very careful with my guesses on Day 100, not wanting to ruin my streak. Then I began to wonder…even if I wanted to lose intentionally, could I do it? Obviously, I could make intentionally bad guesses, but that would take the fun out of it. So I decided to build Don’t Wordle.
Iterations I have gone through:
The first version of the game was simpler and much worse IMO. I did not display the “Valid Words Remaining” at the top, and there was no concept of “Undos". Initially, I actually displayed the Wordle word at the top throughout the entire game! To be honest, that doesn’t change the difficulty of the game that much. However, given that the spirit of the game is not to guess the Wordle word, it seemed like the right decision to hide it.
I created the “Valid Words Remaining” feature when I realized how challenging the game was. I kept getting stuck and wondering whether there were even any words left besides to Wordle word. When I saw how fast the count shrinks, I felt the game was a lot more interesting.
I then added the concept of “Undos” when I realized the game was still too challenging. It’s particulary lame if you’re playing the game for the first time and you get eliminated after just 1 or 2 guesses.
Current Tech Stack:
-Route53 + Cloudfront + S3 + Create React App
Unexpected challenges:
1. The animations. I obviously copied all the concepts from the original Wordle, but I failed to appreciate the complexity.
2. The nuances of the repeat letter words.
3. What makes a Wordle square yellow? The answer is not so simple
4. Trying to get www.dontwordle.com and dontwordle.com to take you to the same URL (either www.dontwordle.com or dontwordle.com) and still support TLS and only use the tech I mentioned above. I actually still don’t have it working perfectly. I know of a solution, but it’s overly complicated
Features I would like to still add:
1. I have heard from multiple people that it’s annoying how you could get the game in an unwinnable state without realizing it. For example, maybe 20 valid words remain, but there is no valid sequence of words remaining to finish the puzzle. While the “Valid Words Remaining” feature is nice, it would also be cool to have a “Valid Solutions Remaining” feature
2. I would like to build a brute force solver that you can watch attempt to play the game in real-time. I have built something similar for a crossword puzzle and really enjoyed watching the computer try to fill the grid. I think it would be cool to do that same thing with this game.
Question I don’t yet know the answer to:
Do any words exist that would not have a single valid solution in this game?
[+] [-] abofh|3 years ago|reply
Otherwise, your best approach is sadly a second cloudfront distribution with a different bucket (or bucket path) that just hosts a redirecting index key because you end up fighting stupid AWS design decisions.
Not that I've ever wasted stupid amounts of time on this particular problem...
[+] [-] TimTheTinker|3 years ago|reply
> it would also be cool to have a “Valid Solutions Remaining” feature
That would be awesome. I suppose the biggest challenge would be to enumerate possible solutions in tree form to allow DFS or BFS searching.
Thanks for sharing!
[+] [-] soxocx|3 years ago|reply
If you use Cloudfront with an S3 bucket as origin for _dontwordle.com_, just create a second Cloudfront with an S3 Bucket for _www.dontwordle.com_ and enable "static website hosting" to redirect to "dontwordle.com" on the second bucket.
[+] [-] cactus2093|3 years ago|reply
One other suggestion, is maybe the win condition shouldn't be exactly the same as in wordle. Instead of only allowing one game per day but using undos to make it easier, maybe allow 5 attempts per day instead? As a player I think it's simpler to be able to retry from the beginning if I lose rather than try to figure out the optimal time to use my undo.
[+] [-] emmelaich|3 years ago|reply
As it's very unlikely you have every word in your list.
[+] [-] FatalLogic|3 years ago|reply
I mean, you start by playing almost the same as standard Wordle, just to guess the answer, without entering it. Then undo everything. Next, figure out a solution which avoids that word. Finally, type in your entire solution.
This could be a bit grindy, and not in the spirit of the game, but it seems like almost assured to win, or am I wrong?
Edit: If there are fewer undos allowed, this strategy gets more difficult
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|3 years ago|reply
Well, I would say the question is poorly posed. The answer to the question as posed is simple as can be if the guess contains no duplicate letters. But if the guess does contain duplicate letters, the question as posed doesn't necessarily have any answer. It may - if all duplicates should be yellow, or if some of them should be green while all the rest are yellow, there's only one valid way to color the guess. But in the general case, you have some number of green squares, some number of yellow squares, and some number of dead squares, and you can swap yellow for dead without affecting the validity of the coloring.
So the question you should be asking is not "should this square be yellow?" but rather "how many yellow squares should this guess receive?". Then you can just choose appropriate squares to color yellow arbitrarily.
[+] [-] InfoSecErik|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxLeiter|3 years ago|reply
Well done!
[+] [-] ghaff|3 years ago|reply
One thing I had wondered--but not enough to figure out what the code does...
Let's say you enter Mamma for example. And there is one M in the word but in the second position. Which M square does Wordle choose to turn yellow? (But maybe it doesn't matter?) There may be other cases like that as well.
[+] [-] mavili|3 years ago|reply
Don't know about Route53 + Cloudfront combination but your #4 challenge would be super simple with a webserver like apache or nginx.
[+] [-] andjd|3 years ago|reply
I don’t know if this is a bug or intentional, but playing today, I was eliminated on the last guess when there was a valid word that was not the wordle word. However, I had used that word previously and it had forced an undo. This came as a surprise, because I knew the word was safe and planned the 5th word to leave that word available.
[+] [-] wlupton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] formerkrogemp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Humphrey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fileformat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soperj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajjenkins|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yreg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aachen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shp0ngle|3 years ago|reply
edit: well, I solved it by adding a breakpoint to handleWordFinishedAnimating and printing this.state.targetWord . (The whole game is run in front-end.)
Well, yeah. That was a word.
[+] [-] ethbr0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MetaWhirledPeas|3 years ago|reply
Sort of. You could argue that Super Mario Bros. is 99.9% losing for most people. But within those losses are little personal victories, like getting past the first Goomba.
I hate games that try to remove all loss, assuming people can't handle it.
[+] [-] pvillano|3 years ago|reply
examples include arcade machines/roguelike, gotcha/lootboxes/gambling, crosswords
psychologists have found that the most effective reinforcement strategy is a combination of continuous and random rewards. For example, in World of Warcraft, enemies have a small amount of gold, but only a chance of carrying a good item.
[+] [-] uxamanda|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/upshot/wordle-bot.h...
[+] [-] ghaff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DungZeekFu|3 years ago|reply
Another point of confusion is that the first row says 2318 possible words, but there only seem to be 2309 words in the dictionary in the code
[+] [-] re|3 years ago|reply
There are two different Wordle word lists--the set of legal guesses (roughly 13k) and the set of words in the solution list (roughly 2k). The latter list is curated to be a set of fair, interesting words, excluding plurals and more obscure words. Most Wordle solvers use knowledge of what words are in the Wordle solution database to pare down the set of "possible words". But with Don't Wordle, the "legal guess" list ends up being the more interesting one to show "remaining possibilities" for.
https://scoredle.com/ is a site that shows possible remaining words using the larger "legal guess" list, so you can see that you could have also guessed "SOCAS".
> Another point of confusion is that the first row says 2318 possible words, but there only seem to be 2309 words in the dictionary in the code
There were 2318 remaining possible words AFTER your first guess, which eliminated ~11k possibilities.
[+] [-] npilk|3 years ago|reply
EDIT: this isn’t it - I missed the C in COMMA!
[+] [-] TuringTest|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html
[+] [-] pvillano|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gjm11|3 years ago|reply
[EDITED to add:] Not exactly the same; with Antiwordle the idea is just to last as long as you can, rather than having a limit of 6, and it doesn't have undos. Also, UX-wise, I don't think Antiwordle tells you how many possibilities remain (win for Don't Wordle), and it doesn't have such slow tile-flipping animations (win for Antiwordle).
[+] [-] meatmanek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giyanani|3 years ago|reply
The gist is you’re trying to find the worst sequence of (hard mode) guesses possible for any word in the wordle set.
Their site shows submissions of up to 16 words and claims 17 is impossible [2]. I’ve been trying to do the same, but have yet to cut the search space enough[3].
Ex: calculating the worst chain for jazzy (with a 1000 word subset of the full word list) took an m1 core 1 hour and resulted in the ten-word chain:
civic, buggy, woody, array, leaky, mammy, fanny, happy, tasty, jazzy
[1] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-index/ [2] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-solution/ [3] https://github.com/roshangiyanani/wordle/blob/main/wordle/el...
[+] [-] indecisive_user|3 years ago|reply
It was tough to come up with any sequence that didn't have a 50/50 chance of losing on the last guess.
https://i.imgur.com/2qZgr15.png
[+] [-] efitz|3 years ago|reply
So again, overall it's cool, but too hard (for me) to seem fun, and it's a very different game than Wordle even though the primary mechanism is the same.
[+] [-] soneca|3 years ago|reply
A feedback: the “you lost” screen passes too quickly, I couldn’t read the word of the day.
[+] [-] xipho|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lapetitejort|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] banana_giraffe|3 years ago|reply
I like this one better, the undo button is a nice touch.
[+] [-] KerrickStaley|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwieback|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] necovek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] necovek|3 years ago|reply
I still failed as I came to a 50-50% chance at the end (I was choosing between "f" and "v" to start the word, got the rest of them right).
[+] [-] butwhywhyoh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstummbillig|3 years ago|reply