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Show HN: A mastermind-like version of Wordle

by prvnsmpth on 2/11/22, 1:19 PM with 61 comments

Wordle reminded me of Mastermind, a game I played as kid, so just for fun I made a version of the game that plays a lot more like Mastermind. I think this version is way more challenging :)

  • by 3pt14159 on 2/11/22, 2:01 PM

    Definitely more challenging but it needs some nice to haves like showing which letters haven't been guessed or that couldn't possibly matter (a zero, zero row). Also, I don't like having to press enter. But overall fun.

  • by scubbo on 2/11/22, 5:21 PM

    My two favourite starting words (SOARE and CLINT[0]) are tagged as invalid here, whereas they're valid in the original game. Literally unplayable /s

    (Seriously - cool idea, nice execution!)

    [0] https://blog.scubbo.org/posts/cheating-at-word-games-part-2/

  • by gsoto on 2/11/22, 2:12 PM

    Very cool. And way more challenging.

    A way to make this a bit easier would be allowing a nonexistent word once per game or something like that.

    > the red tile indicates the number of correct characters in the correct position

    I suggest using another color for that, as red is associated with error most of the time. Why not using the green/yellow for the numbers too?

  • by marcofatica on 2/11/22, 2:45 PM

    Can't backspace on Android chrome. To replace a letter I have to long press to highlight then hit my new letter

  • by paulluuk on 2/14/22, 9:02 AM

    Any tips on how to solve them? I start off with words like 'piano' and 'lemur' to get some idea of which characters to include, but after that it just seems like a brute force challenge?

    E.g. let's say 'piano' gives you 0/1 and 'lemur' gives you 1/0, how do I proceed from there?

    I'd know that the word will contain one of 'lemur' in that exact position, and none of the others. Likewise one of 'piano' but not in that position.

    So the number of combinations possible right now is 5x(5x4)=100, each with 3 open slots that can contain 26-8=18 other characters. So 100x18x18x18=583200 options. And I only have a few guesses left.

    So let's see if we can narrow it down with a word like 'jumpy'. I'm already screwing up now because I've used the letters 'u' and 'p' before already. Let's say 'jumpy' returns 0/0.

    Did this narrow a lot down for me? I now know that we can ignore p and u, which means our options went down from 583200 options to 216000 options.

    If I keep this up, I might get down to roughly 14000 options by the final line. Granted that only a few of these will be valid words, but still more than enough options to randomly guess.

    So far I have not been able to get more than 1 letter correct.

  • by nreece on 2/12/22, 3:33 AM

    Nice, I've also been enjoying Word Master, another Mastermind/Wordle-like word guessing game: https://octokatherine.github.io/word-master/

    Repo: https://github.com/octokatherine/word-master

  • by smallerfish on 2/11/22, 5:49 PM

    Very nice. I agree with keeping track of which letters were guessed, maybe giving users the ability to set flags on them to keep track of their deductions in place of auto-eliminating them.

    My first real program (age 8) was an implementation of mastermind written in gwbasic. IIRC it worked surprisingly well.

    Request - cursor keys, overtyping, delete, etc should work better. Right now there are a few glitches in the cells.

  • by IneffablePigeon on 2/11/22, 3:11 PM

    Not sure how you make this more obvious, perhaps I'm just slow today, but I failed because I didn't twig that when I got a letter in the right place it would make the right hand number go _down_ as well as incrementing the left number. I.e. I thought the right number was the total correct letters rather than just the count of letters that were correct _and_ in the wrong place.

  • by greatjack613 on 2/11/22, 7:09 PM

    This is a cool concept especially now that the old one got susbsumed by the NYT.

    I am currently using https://wordlle.app, but it still contains Google Analytics.

    Does anyone here know of a clone that has absolutely zero tracking?

  • by cuteboy19 on 2/11/22, 2:47 PM

    Don't know why but it takes 2 backspace to erase a letter on Android Firefox.

  • by bradhensen on 2/11/22, 2:29 PM

    What's with Wordle like games popping out here on HN

  • by altairprime on 2/11/22, 3:05 PM

    One tech note: please consider disabling autocorrect in the letter input fields, as I was getting popups whenever I entered an i.

  • by dplgk on 2/12/22, 1:24 PM

    I can't find a way to exit the "how to play" screen. Hitting back on Android exits the game.

  • by not2b on 2/11/22, 5:57 PM

    Got it in four, thanks to use of grep with the "enable1" word list and a bit of luck. Nicely done.

  • by theschmed on 2/11/22, 2:04 PM

    When I lose it doesn’t seem to tell me what the correct answer was, is that correct?

  • by foolinaround on 2/11/22, 3:33 PM

    An easy mode could provide a querty keyboard that one can eliminate letters.

  • by chromaton on 2/11/22, 2:22 PM

    It doesn't recognize SOARE or UNLIT, 2 of my favorite Wordle guesses.

  • by lupire on 2/11/22, 7:20 PM

    Take 2 or 3 presses for Enter to submit on Firefox on Android.

  • by sc__ on 2/11/22, 2:16 PM

    Fun and challenging! Looking forward to tomorrow's word.

  • by foolinaround on 2/11/22, 3:25 PM

    each game should have an id that can be retrieved, so a link can be shared for that particular word...

  • by vehemenz on 2/11/22, 2:49 PM

    This is way more fun.

    Wordle is cool, but short of purposely making bad guesses I'm not sure how anyone could lose at it.

  • by sib301 on 2/11/22, 1:56 PM

    Where can we find it? :)