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).

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

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.

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

Well this sure makes Wordle feel a lot easier!

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

Not much fun to play with a dictionary like this :-/

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.

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?

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

(totally didn't cheat: https://github.com/murfalo/dontwordle-assistant)

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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?

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?

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.

(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.