Clarence "Sparr" Risher

I love word games. I have played Boggle, Scrabble, Upwords, Duple, Acrophobia, Paperback, etc a combined thousands of times.

I also love logic games. Deductive and inductive logic feature heavily in some of my favorite games, including Hanabi, Code 777, Zendo, Letters from Whitechapel, etc. I haven't played Mastermind since I learned how to solve it as a child, other than as a minigame in Nethack, but it fits here too.

Based on this, I expected to love Wordle. And I did, for a couple of weeks. But then I hit a single "feature" of the game that ruined it for me, namely the word lists.

SPOILER ALERT!

The Wordle dictionary contains about ten thousand words that you are allowed to guess. This is comparable to Scrabble's dictionary (about nine thousand five-letter words), and so right on target for a typical word game player.

SPOILER ALERT!

However, only 2300 of those words can be the answer. Over 3/4 of the words you can guess to get clues can't possibly be the solution to the puzzle.
This detail is what led to this outcome for me in a hard mode game:

    ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩
    ⬛🟩🟩⬛🟩
    ⬛🟩🟩⬛🟩
    ⬛🟩🟩⬛🟩
    ⬛🟩🟩⬛🟩
    ⬛🟩🟩⬛🟩

Every one of those black squares is a unique letter. I did not waste any guesses. Despite that, there were nine different words that fit the pattern, and my four guesses from #2 to #5 eliminated seven of them, leaving a 50/50 shot at the final guess.

However, of those nine words, only five of them appear on the shorter potential solution list, which I didn't know about at the time. Four of those five could have been eliminated in two guesses, meaning I could have won in at most 3 guesses if I'd had that list.

This is when I quit Wordle. I came for a game of logic and skill and vocabulary, and left when it became a game determined either by chance or by seeking outside information about the game not otherwise presented to players.

PS: I also don't like the part of crossword puzzles where there's some hidden rule about how the puzzle works that you can't figure out until halfway through, if you get there. I didn't know this was a thing until recently when I did some puzzles with a avid crosswording friend, having failed at most crossword puzzles in the past probably due to this thing.

When two players want to engage in a game together, they first have to agree on what kind of game it is going to be. They have to agree on what the rules of the game are, how the game works, what they are going to do independently and with each other during the game, etc. ( Read more... )