Defend The Indefensible: Wordle

been really enjoying myself the past two days with the box office variation of wordle:

https://boxofficega.me/

Redactle #24 in 13 guesses, 92.31%

24 ???????? 107 56.07%

ran around the houses, as usual. then had an epiphany whilst in the kitchen making tea

does middle ages appear in every Wikipedia article? also ancient rome

Redactle took me so so many guesses today, I guessed the plural of the solution and got many happy returns but it never occurred to me to try the singular and so I was guessing and guessing and guessing

weird, today’s Redactle answer consists of only one box. I thought for sure it had to be “Swinging on a Star”. I mean, like:

A pig is an animal with dirt on his face. His shoes are a terrible disgrace. He has no manners when he eats his food. He's fat and lazy and extremely rude. But if you don't care a feather or a fig, you may grow up to be a pig.

totally fits!

anyways, solved Redactle #24 in a mere 273 guesses (48.72%)

I've been enjoying boxofficega.me as well. I'm pretty good at it as long as the date is before 2010. It's crazy how many successful movies I've never heard of have been released since I became a father.

oof, that one is impossible for me. I got one right off the bat and had zero idea about the others. I thought the box office winner came out years before!

I generally need to reveal the tagline and genre before being able to guess, if I still have no idea I reveal first actor.

Ah, I somehow didn’t spot the hints feature. Got one yesterday quite quickly then was flailing around.

Ha - pretty much same today despite using the hints. Got one straight away then no others except a couple of others when I revealed all the hints and lost all points. Should have got The Martian though.

I solved today's Redactle (#25) in 45 guesses with an accuracy of 71.11%. Played at https://www.redactle.com/

fucking fuck. general knowledge letting me down.

Oh redeactle is fun. 69 guesses, 58% accuracy .

this one was pretty easy for me compared to yesterday's which took forever... got that it was a large inhabited place pretty early because i usually guess "popular" and "culture" to get "in popular culture," and i got just a plain "culture" section instead which is very helpful. originally assumed country, and i guess i cheated? by looking at a list of african countries and guessing all the five letter ones. i don't know if that counts as cheating in the general consensus. i probably should've tried a little harder to think of them. and then when i figured it was a city i had to dig a little more, because i'm ignorant about african geography and never would've thought of the answer without help

words i now throw in automatically at the beginning of every game:

be
are
were
this
that
there
have
will
such

some of these are ridiculous, especially the first three which are literally forms of "is." i've been assuming the dev would add some more common words and some other QOL things you'd expect (like a give up button), but he's been mysteriously AWOL from both of his twitter accounts and reddit for weeks. not that i expect anything from a free game, at this point i'm just getting concerned about the guy.

I used to guess some of those common words and others but now I think it just ups the score without gaining anything - you might fill out some sentences but the critical words will still be a mystery. Got today's in 28, not that I take that as proof of the above strategy which I've only just started on!

looked up the answer at 156 having got as far as "most populous city in Nigeria"

I solved today's Redactle (#25) in 9 guesses with an accuracy of 77.78%. Played at https://www.redactle.com/

I'm not sure where the cheating line is with these. it's certainly wrong to Google phrases in the answer to find the exact page they are taken from but what about narrowing it down to an exact thing, an Australian animal say, and then looking up a list of those?

I don’t do any of that, unless I’ve given up. I got today’s in 11. Might be the first time I’ve pretty much read the form of the first sentence from the outset.

like with Chopin, you narrow it down to a single proper noun but aren't that up on your polish composers. it stops being a word puzzle and becomes general knowledge.

the other thing I've noticed is that it's harder on my phone because the squares are physically bigger, wider than the letters, so you can't see exactly how long the redacted words are. (also the keyboard and the guess box fight with each other)

on my ancient samsung the input box is about one pixel high, hitting it is half the game. i can select blank squares to see how long the words are though.

like with Chopin, you narrow it down to a single proper noun but aren't that up on your polish composers. it stops being a word puzzle and becomes general knowledge.

You mean the Inca one?

I think that Redactle is definitely a knowledge game, just like Worldle is a geography game.

Inca one, sorry. I’m clearly not adding to my general knowledge very well.

Annoying that, given the open-source nature of Wikipedia, that the dating conventions are inconsistent, e.g. AD and BC vs. CE and BCE.

like with Chopin, you narrow it down to a single proper noun but aren't that up on your polish composers. it stops being a word puzzle and becomes general knowledge.

― koogs, Sunday, 1 May 2022 20:32 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

feeling this today...I've got Babylon, Assyria, Mesopotamia and am now wracking my brain for other place names

You are so close, my dude. So very very close.

yeah you're about to make the exact same error I made that resulted in [redacted] minutes of pointless brain scraping

wtf I have never heard of Babylonia

Redactle in 58 and a fair amount of confusion

I solved today's Redactle (#26) in 50 guesses with an accuracy of 70.00% - my best result so far, bar that Meryl-Streep-in-3 fluke.

115 guesses, 69% accuracy, getting the final answer was a fluke

(█, █, █, █, █, ██, ██, ██, ██, and ██)

this has to be something, but god knows what

today's is another subject area i know very little about

guessing words based on second hand references like pixies lyrics and The Warriors

yeah you're about to make the exact same error I made that resulted in [redacted] minutes of pointless brain scraping

My 860 guesses feels this acutely (I had to look up hints to get to the right answer despite getting Babylon and Babylonian at 115 and 116).

koogs, at one point I was inputting everything I could remember from playing Civilization VI

lol Leee that is v close to mine too: 680 guesses, those two words at 135 and 136, fairly demoralizing though I got yesterday's in 24

26 ????????? 130 54.62%

the thing that was obviously something was nothing

300, the Frank miller thing was another, failed source of guesses

when i should've been guessing things from bob marley all along

I gave up after 100, I had Mesopotamia fairly early on and knew that was probably as close as I was going to get. i cheated to get akkadian which was no help, can't imagine I would have got it if I'd carried on plugging away.

yesterday i overlooked africa until late having done 4 other continents and got nowhere. maybe if I'd literally slept on it i may've got lagos, but i doubt it

the other thing that would've helped today is conan the barbarian. i noticed Cimmeria was mentioned

Redactle #26 in 170 guesses, accuracy 77.65%. another Babylon ……………… Babylonia journey here. Stuff upthread too spoilery, glad I didn’t look at this thread

#24 in 197 haha just when I was starting think 'I'm pretty good at this' - got a kind of medieval religious orders thing and just got super stuck digging around guilds and templars and trying to remember what else they did - eventually hostel and hotel got me there

#25 in 27 lucky. fast to African city, and got West, then realised I didn't have much of a grasp of African geography (eg trying out the North African countries because well they're sort of west as well). But eventually hit Nigeria then straight to the answer - absolutely would not have been able to get it if it was Abuja

#26 in 54 Hit the same dead end as everyone else but then looking back over the number of hits for Babylon/Babylonian vs any other plausible local civ made me pause and think hard

Redactle #27 in 6 guesses with 62.50% accuracy. That's more like it.

Ha, sorry, 16 guesses not 6. Overexcited.

#27
You solved it in 39 guesses
Your accuracy was 51.28%
Globally, 180 players have solved today's Redactle so far

Bit hot on the heels of screw, this one

82 guesses for today's redactle. Somehow it was "hair" at guess 80 that got me to the answer