I’ve failed twice so far, I think. Both times it was because I knew four of the letters in the right place, but had multiple possible answers for the fifth letter that would all be legitimate words, and I picked the wrong ones first. e.g.
By guess 4, using TOTAL, I finally determine it must be:
*LOAT
My fifth guess is the obvious:
FLOAT
But it’s wrong. So amongst the available letters, my next best, and final, guess is:
BLOAT
But no, it turns out the answer was: GLOAT
A relatively obscure word that was not likely to leap into my head.
In hard mode it is completely possible to lose. Say you get three correct in the first word, you have 21 letters left to eliminate, and a maximum of 10 spots for guesses. Some of those letters could be eliminated because they don’t occur in a word that fits with your original three, but on the other hand some of your original corrects could be doubled.
Like most puzzle games it would (or will) get tedious to me if I automated the process. But though I use the same first word every time, since I’m playing in hard mode the second guess is informed by the feedback on that and I’m probably never going to not have to give it a think.
I haven’t had a miss yet but have had 3 6s under these circumstances. I recall one was SOLAR - I tried MOLAR and BOLAR (???) before the correct answer.
I think you have also explained the (not understood by me) appeal of instant scratch-off lottery tickets. I occasionally get these in birthday cards, and while I’m grateful for being thought of, I inwardly sigh and think “aw jeez, too much work”. Those things can be a surprising amount of tedious effort to complete. I’ll often just hand it to one of my kids and say, “here, I’ll split any winnings with you.”
Being fairly easy also means you get longer streaks, which adds a sort of tension. If a good streak is 4 or 5 days, you don’t really care. But the higher it goes, the more you worry.
Not sure how it’s a scam. It’s just a little game a guy made to amuse his friends that caught on with the public. I play it while I’m having my morning coffee. Why does it have to be more than that?
To me the appeal is that it seems a lot harder than it actually is. It doesn’t seem like you ought to be able to guess a weird word like ROBOT from nothing (but of course it’s not exactly nothing).
And there’s always a big sense of achievement when you get it in 2 or 3 tries (or, well, I was happy to get ROBOT in 6 tries). The occasional curveballs make it really fun.
Then there’s the strategy… do I start with TEARS and end up having to solve a partial jumble for the least amount of tries? Or do I start with DECOY to make it easier by snapping up some overlooked, semi-common letters that might be more informative? (that’s what I started doing after getting burned by PROXY).
hard to say exactly, but it’s less than obvious. Here’s obvious:
Flip a quarter, a nickel, a penny and a dime every day, and try to have them all come up differently. If you have all four heads or all four tails, you lose.
You wouldn’t play because it would be too easy to “win” and no big deal if you lost once in a while. If Wordle were three moves and done, it would be way too hard. If it were ten moves and done, it would be too easy. Six chances is a perfect balance to keep everyone winning the vast majority of the time. So that’s what I mean by a scam–it appears challenging but it really isn’t.
Also it doesn’t really mean anything. You’re not smart or skilled if you get it in three moves consistently–you’re fairly literate and pretty lucky, is all that means. And you’re not a moron if it takes you five or six moves most of the time–you’re mostly unlucky and maybe a little limited in your vocabulary, but it really doesn’t signify anything. It’s a game of mostly luck disguised as a game of skill.
Yeah, but it’s free and there are no ads, so there is no scam. It might be an easy game, but that’s all.
Also, winning is how you define it. I consider every guess after the first to be a slight loss, so winning on a second guess is gold; winning on guesses 3-4, silver; and winning on 5-6 is bronze.
Because it is nothing more than a free diversion, I don’t see how the term scam is at all applicable.
Life is sad and complex. 5 minutes of a basic game is okay with me. I’m in it for the fun with patterns and relaxation, not winning. Same with NYT Tiles on Zen Mode.
It’s not much of a scam, if it is one at all–maybe “gimmick” is better. It draws you into it with the illusion of difficulty, of a challenge but it’s not all that challenging. As I keep saying, the whole thing is built on the arbitrary concept of when the game is over–it’s calibrated precisely to maximize our pleasure in playing it, but it’s just a number picked by the game’s inventor. There’s no real significance attached to it.
I think it’s less about the size of your vocabulary and more about the way your brain works. If you play a lot of Jumble type games, you develop strong intuitions about certain patterns and relationships. Finding those patterns and applying guesses is what is satisfying.
I like that you can only play once a day; no addiction factor and very little wasted time for a pleasant little challenge. The one-upmanship when sending a “2” to my sister added a nice touch.
Add in no ads, no request for email address, no sign-up, … I like it.
I keep thinking about what MAKES it work. I think it would have been a disaster at only three guesses and then the answer gets revealed, and a worse disaster if you got ten shots at it.
But it’s basically the same concept, right? Nothing inherent to six tries–it just pleases people the most at six.
Would chess be less appealing if you had an extra row or two in the middle of the chessboard? Would poker suck if you played with 84 cards (or some peculiar number, maybe 40 or 60)? Would dice be radically different if we played with 3 cubes instead of three? I’m not sure. Different, yeah, of course. But significantly worse, the way I’m speculating that Wordle would? I don’t know.
Apart from the gameplay, what I appreciate about it is how little it cares about me. It doesn’t try to remind me to play. It doesn’t require an account or ask for an email address. It doesn’t serve me ads or nag me to rate it somewhere, or try to influence my behavior. It doesn’t try to monetize me in any way I can see. And that seems pretty rare and awesome in the realm of free online diversions, especially once they get popular.
(I’m sure if I was the developer, I might sometimes be tempted to think to myself damn, if only I could just get a lousy penny every time someone played this, I might pick up some nice spending money! But how to do that without engaging in the above-mentioned annoying practices, I wouldn’t know. And it seems that the developer doesn’t want that anyway.)
Yes, it is a genuinely free diversion. I’m not averse to some sort of monetisation, but the kind of transparent money grabbing tactics employed by some games is extremely off-putting.
My six year old daughter was playing a Roblox game on Xbox recently. If you don’t know, Roblox is essentially a coding platform that allows anyone to make games for anyone to play. The games typically are free (maybe they are all free, not sure) but some will have additional features/items available for purchase with “Robux” which are, of course, purchased with real bucks.
So she was playing an obstacle course game where you have to navigate an obstacle course, mainly by jumping over or going around objects. She kept getting a pop-up window offering some kind of power up, at a price of course. I figured out that this pop-up would appear every fifth time she jumped. It would be very easy for a child to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in a very short amount of time if their parents are a bit clueless and don’t lock payment methods down. Even though I am aware, she managed to accidentally spend $25 because of a glitch in the way the marketplace works on the Xbox version of Microsoft Flight Simulator.