lynn / hello

Word-guessing game

hello

A word game. Play it here.

Introduction

hello is a word game similar to the TV show Lingo.

You get 6 tries to guess a 5-letter target word. After each guess, the letters light up in various colors as clues. Green means a letter is correct in this spot; yellow means a letter is elsewhere in the target word; gray means a letter is not in the target word at all.

Click About inside the game to learn by example.

Where are the words coming from?

To generate target words, I have been manually curating the top 25,000 or so entries of Peter Norvig's English word frequency list to get rid of obscure words, plurals, conjugated verbs, inappropriate language, and British spellings (sorry). If you get dealt a strange target word, please open an issue on this here GitHub repository.

To check guesses, I use some variation of the Official Tournament and Club Word List used in North American Scrabble tournaments. (I'm not a native English speaker, but my English tends mostly American.)

For developers

You're very welcome to create your own offshoot/remix based on hello. To get started, you can fork the code on GitHub.

To run the code locally, first install Node.js and npm. Then, in this directory, open a terminal and run npm install followed by npm run start. hello will be running at http://localhost:3000/. Any changes you make to the source code will be reflected there. Have fun!

Finally, npm run deploy will deploy your code to the gh-pages branch of your fork, so that everyone can play your version at https://yourname.github.io/hello (or the name of your fork if you renamed it).

hello's Issues

Remove plurals

Plurals are no fun because you don't guess only 5-letters words, but also 4-letters words with plurals.

The word list of Wordle doens't include plural words, while with your version at the moment when I try, 1 in every 3 hidden word is a plural word.

So please remove plural words, or at least groom the entry list. (Note, not every word that ends with an 's' is a plural.)

Webpage loses keyboard focus after typing first character

Steps to reproduce:

1. Navigate to website
2. Adjust slider to pick different word length
3. Begin typing a word

Expected behaviour:

1. The full word is entered into the grid

Actual behaviour:

1. Only the first character is entered. You need to click the page before you can resume playing.

Seen on Firefox. Works as expected on Chrome.

Feature Request: Show Dvorak and Colemak keyboard layouts

As a Dvorak typist, it would be nice to see the Dvorak layout beneath the puzzle instead of Qwerty. This could be a setting toggle.

Google Analytics without Cookies (or GDPR rules)

This might be a solution for you. I for one would be interested in some stats on most-guessed words, etc.

Suggestion: Display Word Count

I would really enjoy seeing a count of the words that are possible with the current guess (after it's resolved). I don't believe it would spoil anything.

For instance, I guessed a word with yellow L in the middle, the other letters were not in the word. I would love to see how many words have an L that's not in that position.

If that's not desirable, it would still be interesting information after solving (or not) the puzzle.

Thanks,
Tom

Site https://hellowordl.net reported by MS SmartScreen as dangerous

Microsoft SmartScreen has reported the site as dangerous due to phishing content. I know from looking here & on the page this is untrue, but it's probably blocking some people from visiting.

This will occur on the Microsoft Edge browser.

Feature Request: add word meaning

In order to improve vocabulary, it would be useful to add a link to the word definition next to each guess. Something like Click here for word definition. If the game is lost, the target word should also have a link to a definition.

Something like this (excuse my poor design skills):

DUPLICATE LETTERS?

currently allows duplicate letters. Should be stated or indicated by color, or reprogrammed to disallow duplicates.

Happy Birthday

Thank you for your activity here and on codegolf :)

Update to ReadMe

Hi,

I'm currently trying to play around with the clone you've made but since I've never used TypeScript or CSS I'm having trouble figuring out how to run the code on my PC.

Would it be possible to add some info to the ReadMe on how to run the code so that people can easily test it and play around with the code you wrote?

why is ''April'' not a valid word?

come on now, we all know April is the forth month of the year and should definitely be a valid word.

Guesses that have two instances of a letter should never show one instance in yellow and one in gray

For instance, I just tried "belly" to try to narrow down where the "L" should be (I already knew "L" was there from a previous guess), but while the first "L" in "belly" turned yellow, the second "L" stayed gray

Thank you!

I've been playing this for the last hour and it's awesome, thanks for taking the time to build it 🙂

Feature Request - Share Challenge

Submitting a feature request if possible where you can hit a share button and generate a link to the current word challenge you just did.
That way, I can send it to friends and family if I felt like a specific work was a really nice challenge.

Does not accept capitalised input

guesses do not accept capitalised A-Z

Static resources 404 on http://foldr.moe/hello-wordl/

Thanks for creating this implementation of the game!

Unfortunately, the game currently won't load for me on http://foldr.moe/hello-wordl/
I get the following in my browser console:

GET http://foldr.moe/static/js/main.f1c0bd93.js net::ERR_ABORTED 404 (Not Found)
GET http://foldr.moe/static/css/main.b2fee078.css net::ERR_ABORTED 404 (Not Found)

Feature request: Share results

Wordle has the ability to share results, e.g. see below.

can't do the same with one click in Hello Wordl, which is sad.

Wordle 216 3/6

⬛⬛⬛🟨🟨
🟩⬛🟩⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Can't challenge friends to uncommon words

I wanted to be clever and encode my own challenges in the URL, but some of them give me the "Invalid challenge string" error because they are rarer than "murky":

https://github.com/lynn/hello-wordl/blob/6583be1968dd3c71f35581569f7bb4599048fd3d/src/Game.tsx#L41

I think replacing targets with targetList here would enable this use case. Does this seem like a reasonable change?

Challenges can be easily abused to make impossible words

Take these 2 links for example:
https://hellowordl.net/?challenge=dW5jb3B5cmlnaHRhYmxl
https://hellowordl.net/?challenge=YmU=

When you open them, you immediately notice something is wrong about them, they have an unusual amount of letters (first link has 15, second one has 2),

This is because challenge links are in base64 which you can easily decode text in and encode text in using https://www.base64encode.org/
I recommend either not using base64 OR just making this impossible all together. Unless this is an intended feature, in which case sorry for making this so pointlessly long.

Anchors break challenge links

When on http://hellowordl.net/#, the generated challenge links have ? after # so the challenge part is interpreted as an anchor rather than a query parameter.

word has 2 of same letter

If a word has 2 letters that are the same, for example THIGH the program will only alert you to one of the letters. First I guessed AGENT, and the G showed as yellow (correct). Then I guessed THING and I got the first three letter THI showing green and the G showing as yellow. That meant the G had to be in the fourth position, as the first three letters THI already confirmed as correct. The only other word that has THIG and a fifth letter is THIGH. But I already got an H confirmed as correct in the second position, and there is apparently no way to notify the player that there is a second H in a different position. I don't know how this will be solved but I hope it will be~!

androgenous not found in word list

Slider for number of guesses

Would it be possible to add a slider for number of guesses as well? So you could design a game with 4-word letters and 8 guesses, for example.

Objectionable words

The answer to the puzzle I just did was "bitch." And then the very next puzzle, the answer was "whore." I would suggest removal of those words from the source list, as well as a brainstorming session to think of others that should probably be removed.

My external keyboard doesn't work if CAPS LOCK is on

ENTER and BACKSPACE still work, but can't type the letters.

I'm really enjoying the game -- thanks!

Feature Request: Stats!

It's be nice to have some kind of stats: number of games played, won, lost, attempts distribution, streak...

Totally loving the fact that I can play more than one word every day!!!

Thanks!!!

Edge case with presence hint and repeated letters

In this example, should the second I in the LIMITS guess also be yellow?

Challenge a friend to this word ios

Currently: When the button is pressed a url is generated. However, the user is unable to interact with the text generated.

Desired functionality: should either copy url to clipboard on button press or text should be able to be highlighted and copied. Of the two I think the first would be best for everyone.

Word list

Hello, I haven't tested this through and through but I'm wondering where you got the word list for this, or what source it's imported from because it seems to be missing words, even ones that "offical" wordle has.

Add indication of duplicate letters

There are a lot of words with two or more of a single letter, but no way to indicate (especially vital for longer word games) that a letter appears more than once.

I propose a third colour code, blue would be ideal, that appears only if a letter is in a valid spot but there are more of that letter to be located.

I don't think you'd need to or want to change the colours of misplaced letters due to how much easier it might make short games, but if you did I'd probably suggest orange for the hint colour.

Here's a couple of mocked up examples, two of just blue and one for comparison with orange as well.

Again, I am not sure it's a good idea to give away this information until a duplicate letter is correctly placed, so the orange tiles are not strictly needed and I'm just including it for the sake of comparison.

Feature request: Adding game number query string value to URL

I love the seeded random puzzles. Sometimes I come across a uniquely interesting and difficult puzzle that I want to share with friends, but the unique puzzle is on game 5 or something, so when I share the puzzle with them they can't go directly to the puzzle I was trying to solve. It would be super great just to have the game number saved in the URL so I could share it!

Thank you for this great extended version of Wordle. Endless Wordles has helped me go from terrible to middlingly average!

Enhancement request: add login

It would be nice to be able to login—perhaps thru a 3rd party like Google, Apple or FB—so your record is retained across devices.

My target word was a proper noun!

Weber is not a valid word. I think proper nouns are not allowed, just dictionary words.

Feature request: Lingo mode

In the TV show Lingo, the first letter is revealed at start and must be used always.

Also you get 5 tries for 5 words.

Hard Mode: original Wordle prevents guessing less letters than yellow+greens

WARNING: The below contains spoilers for Wordle 219.

See the below screenshots. ALLEY is the first guess in all screenshots, returning [absent, elsewhere, elsewhere, absent, absent].

From my understanding, hello wordl (currently) only enforces this in Ultra Hard, and only enforces "guess must contain the letter" in Hard Mode - even if there are multiple yellows. The two attempted guesses above would be valid in hello wordl's current implementation of Hard Mode.

Inconsistent proper noun inclusion and American bias

Above: One of many, many examples.

I also want to note that it would be nice to have a separate option for british spelling (colour, armour, favourite, aluminium etc) though it might be a bit challenging to implement that given the sheer number of edge cases.

Colorblind options

Would be cool to include a pattern in addition to the yellow/green/grey options, that way it eliminates any issues for folx who are colorblind.

easier wordlist please!

Great app!
Current word list not really practical for the average level of English. Could you create an easier version for language learners please?

Feature Request: Color Blind Mode

Please add a color-blind mode, as in the original.

Add other languages

I discovered Wordle today and realised that I would love to play in French. Then I found out about this project, which might be the place to do that? Maybe just adding the mechanics for language selection, and then external contributors can contribute word lists?

(how did you make the English wordlist in the first place? Is it based on the n most used word in English or something like that?)

If this go live, the interface probably should be translated too at some point.

Hard mode doesn't detect letter in wrong position

I was hoping hard mode would protect me from mistakes like this,. I already knew that "A" couldn't be the third letter, but it let me put it there again.

Add dark mode toggle

Backspace triggers browser history

I use Backspace to return to the previous page in my browser, but when I press Backspace in Hello Wordl, this should not happen of course. I think adding e.preventDefault() to
https://github.com/lynn/hello-wordl/blob/47a7782b8fb8590a6c400e037eac02c87c7e8504/src/Game.tsx#L97
should fix this.

how come this word is not accepted ?

It says 'muslim' is not a word !

Add hard mode

Like Wordle, "hard" mode enforces that the present/correct colour hints are respected in subsequent guesses. Unlike Wordle it would be nice if this version enforced the "must not place letter in same place if given yellow hint" constraint.

duplicate letter coloring

Right now, if a letter appears N times in the answer and more than N times in a guess, only the first N appearances of the letter are colored.

For instance, in the screenshot below, the answer is HANDWRITTEN. When I guess the word ATTRACTIONS, it colors the first two Ts yellow (because there are two Ts in HANDWRITTEN) and leaves the third one gray.

This isn't, to my understanding, proper Mastermind-style feedback. All three Ts should be colored yellow, to indicate that there are Ts in the answer, but not in those locations. This way gives too much information.

plural nouns ending in s should not be allowed as answers

Wordle allows them as guesses, but not answers.

Letters now have scrollbars (desktop, chrome)

This is pretty recent, so I'm suspecting the last CSS commit an hour ago might've done it.

Mobile browsers seems unaffected; I haven't checked other desktop browsers.

Avoid target words that differ from many other words by just one letter.

The only games I have lost are the ones where there are many common words that differ from the target word by one letter. Example: hills, bills, tills, rills, gills, fills, pills, kills, mills, sills, wills
Not quite as bad example: blues, flues, slues, clues, glues
This does not seem to happen in Wordle, presumably because target words are limited to avoid this problem.

License is missing

Hi, under what license is hello-world released?