What’s cheaty about looking at the guess (valid words) list? You don’t get penalized if you use the wrong word in any way, so there’s no advantage to knowing what’s on that list. If you want to know if a word is not on that list, you just guess it and the game will tell you.
I’m with you too.
Yeah, that game can be made, but to make it enjoyable for the mass audience, you know that they are going to use a limited subset of 5-letter English words to make the game seem “fair” to everyone. Ever play Scrabble with somebody who plays it completely casually and starts crying foul when you throw down words like NIQAB or QATS or AAS? Imaging this on a mass scale if the NYTimes allowed the more obscure words. Hell, they got rid of AGORA (which was in the original) for being too uncommon. When I coded my version of the game years ago, I did the same thing after play-testing a few rounds and realizing how many ridiculous 5-letter words there are in the English language. And even if you don’t come to this realization immediately, after playing several rounds worth of words you begin to realize: hey, with all the four-letter words out there you can add an “S” to, it’s pretty weird not one has shown up. Or, hmm, of all the wacky Scrabble words out there, all the answers seem to be within the grasp of the average English speaker. So, with more and more trials, you should realize (if you are playing this as a logic game) that not every valid 5-letter word that appears in the Scrabble dictionary or what not is going to be fair game.
I agree in general that it feels cheaty to look at the lists. While I do have the urge to analyze them without looking at them, that also feels cheaty to me so I haven’t. (Also I’m lazy, and too busy playing Skylines to bother.)
Not that I feel any kind of way about others who do. It just feels cheaty to me; I don’t then project that judgment onto others if they look. I’m happy others do, actually, because a couple times I’ve gotten questions answered I was really curious about but didn’t want to look myself.
The night before last – when I wrote down all the words I could see and what feedback they’d return to ensure all were unique – almost ruined the game for me. Doing that is hugely helpful, an obnoxious amount of work, and completely unfun. It’s hard for me to not play to the fullest, and it felt like not doing that was equivalent to not playing hard mode rules, etc… Like I wasn’t fully playing.
But then I decided that writing down and checking feedback on all possibilities you can see is equivalently cheaty to looking at the word lists, so I’m all happy again. Thus, I have a new rule: No writing or typing while playing. I’m only allowed to do it in my head.
Nice, good one!
Yeah, I’m fine with knowing the basics, like no plurals and that the answers are all commonly known words. But looking at the list, I would be more likely to have those words come to me when I am playing, I think. Or to know for sure that a word I thought of is not an answer. I don’t want that to happen.
(And although I agreed with the post that said it was cheating adjacent, I meant no judgment about how others play. It’s just about how I choose to play.)
Wordle 274 2/6* 3/20/22
ALLOW
RENEW
Ok, this deserves some explanation. After the initial play of yesterday’s solution, a whole lot of words ending in AW or OW were eliminated. I couldn’t think of a single ???IW word, so it had to end in EW. I thought AGNEW for a second, but, no, just no. STREW was a possibility, but it’s pretty much never used as a present-tense verb. I considered IEW endings and ?I?EW words, but came up with nothing. With ?E?EW, there was BEDEW and RENEW I thought of, and I guessed the second as it seemed more common.
Excellent! Love earned 2s.
I guess I’m on the Wheelz team about referring to word lists. I just see it as a little more fun to throw choices around in my head until I find one that fits, where a little work with grep would make it easy if you had word lists to work from. Again, no judgment implied - just how I’d prefer to play the game.
The only times I’ve looked at the answer list were to check if my intuition that a valid word was unplayable was correct (or somebody was wondering). And every time it has been. (With the semi-exception of AGORA, which was playable in the original version, but not after the New York Times pared the list. So with the NYTimes, I was half-right.) You play enough word games and you get a sense of what words are allowed pretty quickly. Some have wider and others narrower word lists.
It helped that I have a library book coming due. 
Oh, if you’re talking about referring to the answer word list while playing, that would personally fall under cheating for myself, like using a letter pattern searchable Scrabble dictionary while you’re playing. I’m not sure anybody is talking about that in this thread, though, are they? Searching the allowable guess list wouldn’t be any type of cheating to me as there’s no penalty for wrong guesses and it’s just faster typing in the darned word and finding out from the game whether it’s playable. I suppose reading the answer list beforehand is gray-area, but that is how Scrabble players get good at their game (though you have a lot less information to take in with a 2000-ish word list, or whatever the size is.) It’s also kind of a waste of time, in my opinion, as you can get a good sense of the word list if you’ve played a few dozen games. Something like “there’s no plurals, or at least -s plurals” (I haven’t checked either way – for all I know, somebody threw in a plural of some type. I suspect GEESE is fair game and it’s only -S plurals that are not in the list, but I haven’t verified) you should have figured out at this point if you’re paying attention, just as people figured out double (or triple) letters are allowed.
To be fair, I feel that knowledge of previous answers is equally cheaty for all the same reasons, but that’s a flaw baked into the game itself.
Better would be if the game just randomly pulled from the list each day, allowing the same answer more than once.
Wordle 274 5/6*
BEARD
REPLY
REMIT
REFER
RENEW
I understand your point, but there would be people annoyed at getting the same answer two days (or more) in a row, much less that within a week. I would argue that that knowledge base is not cheaty, but rather experience, and requires some skill in, well, memory. The game is already enough based on chance as it is. Better players with more experience in the game should have some advantage over those who haven’t played it.
Yep, my suggestion would have its own baked in flaws. Having several different within-the-last-week repeats all bunched together would be statistically very likely and would also kill the game dead. So you’d have to code in some kind of non-repeat period. Maybe, say, grab a new freshly-shuffled 100 words every 100 days.
But that’s exactly the same problem now as the original. For 100 days you get that same knowledge of previous answers as in the current game. The only way to prevent it is to allow duplicates, but you’re right that duplicates in rapid succession would suck and would happen, probably a lot.
In the end the actual design is the most elegant solution. The fallibility of human memory makes it unlikely someone will remember hundreds of past answers offhand, so it’s partially self-correcting.
It kind of ruins the SHA_E trap words, though. Doesn’t take much memory to remember which variations have been answers.
How about: Randomly select from the list, repeats allowed, but only one repeat allowed per calendar month. Subsequent repeats would be redrawn until unique. A repeat is a word that was already an answer at any time, not just in that month.
This would cap the bunches at two repeats in a row, one at the end of one month and one at the beginning of the next. I could live with that.
This one could have been tricky.
Wordle 274 4/6*
IRATE
CLERK
OWNER
RENEW
I’ve never looked at any lists. I gleaned from reading here that plurals aren’t used. That’s it. As others have said, I don’t judge how others approach the game. I do appreciate spoilers on it if discussed here, though.
Do you really think most people can remember what was actually a previous answer vs what was just a guess? Other than the ones that really stood out, like VIVID, I can’t even remember what the answer was three days ago, let alone three months ago. Other than knowing that the answers have never been plurals I don’t think there is any extra knowledge gained from previously playing.
And count me in with those who have zero interest in reading any kind of answer list. I also use a different start word every time, IMO using a list and the same words all the time just seems to suck all the fun out of it.
I remember the trap words. Specifically, I remember which SHA_E variation was an answer, as well as _ATCH and _LOAT. This makes the other variations easier to guess, less of a trap.
But to your point, I don’t think I’ll retain that information indefinitely. My memory of the _ATCH answer is already hazy.