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#1 is why it's so successful. It's just challenging enough to make you think, but still solvable by most people. So we all get that nice dopamine rush of solving a puzzle with a reasonable perceived effort.

How many people don't play the NYT Sunday Crossword b/c they never get more than a few words? There is a very devoted fan base for crossword, but it's not as universal as Wordl's adoption.

To me, that's the genius - just hard enough, but not too hard. It's not a Scrabble competition, it's a fun diversion and shared challenge to experience with your friends.

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I'm actually sort of a "word" person. I've written books for publishers and do a fair bit of writing for my job. But crosswords have always fallen into the too much work category for me and I've never really connected to word games in general (including Scrabble).

But, yeah, I like Wordle and it hits a sweet spot for me.

I played pretty high level Scrabble for a few years and most people who connect deeply with Scrabble are programmers, mathematicians, musicians, scientists, accountants, etc. Hardly anybody at the medium-to-high levels of play are word people.

At its core, Scrabble is just a game of probability, memory, spatial awareness, and pattern recognition. The words could be random collections of symbols.

Yep, in fact in 2015 Nigel Richards won the French Scrabble World Championship without speaking any French.

There’s a bunch of Thai guys who crush at North American English Scrabble.

My dream version of Scrabble would have a score system somehow based on word infrequency, so more interesting words would gain higher scores, exactly to mitigate the phenomenon you describe here.

It’s a fun thought but how do you define infrequency and what is an interesting word?

ANESTRI is a very uncommon word by most “normal” measures (it’s the plural of anestrus, a period of sexual dormancy) but it’s (among) the most likely (by probability) 7-letter word played in tournament Scrabble games — there’s something like 9 anagrams of ANESTRI.

Keeping a rolling social history via some sort of merge-friendly approximate frequency data-structure (e.g., count-min sketch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch ) would allow you to score the game dynamically based on the play history of the current players, their friends, or others with similar or different characteristics (e.g., "We're playing Brooklyn Scrabble now!").

Yes it’s certainly not a trivial problem. Assuming the requirement for a digital component in order to compute word scores, perhaps frequency could be weighted by previous (competition?) word plays.

That would just reward people who spend years memorizing entire dictionaries. Scrabble is already too skewed in favor of the elite players, IMO.

As paulcole says about chess, "the better player nearly always wins," and that's a problem when the only way to win is to turn the game into an obsession or a career. A big part of Wordle's appeal is that a reasonable vocabulary, and not a savant-level one, is all you need to bring to the table.

Fascinating. Although I can program I’ve basically ended up as someone who can do fairly in-depth technical writing among many other things. And I’m not generally a word puzzle fan.

I can’t program but for awhile I wrote for a living.

I was an English major in college and got hooked on Scrabble after reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, a sportswriter from The Wall Street Journal. I’d always been into gambling and games with a luck factor like poker, backgammon, cribbage, etc., so that might have something to do with it. Always hated chess because the better player (nearly) always wins.

Scrabble’s an interesting game but unless you’re very talented at anagramming and have a good memory, it’s a bit of a slog to learn enough of the “rules” of the game (the words) to make it really fun. At my “peak”, I was studying 20 or so hours a week and wasn’t even making progress anymore, just maintaining the stuff I’d already learned.

It was a way to pass a few years of my life. I traveled around to tournaments, sometimes won enough to break even, met some interesting weirdos, and had a good enough time. But one day I just had enough and put it down and never picked it up again. Just stopped thinking it was fun, I guess.

Biggest thing I took away from it was really seeing how a few minutes (and eventually a few hours) of work a day could help you change how your brain works and how you see the world. I vividly remember one day at work I saw a guy whose name badge said Demetrius. I instantly thought “oh if you add a ‘u’ to his name and rearrange the letters it spells ‘deuteriums.’”

Now, when I think something is too hard or too big to accomplish, I think about that and just start chipping away.

come back to tourney Scrabble! I see that we almost overlapped and played in the Phoenix nationals but different divisions. I was addicted until Feb 2020, then the pandemic started, so we made a site to let us play online tournaments (https://woogles.io)

Ha, yeah we definitely know some of the same people. I remember that Phoenix Biltmore being so expensive I shared a room with like 7 other 25-year old guys for the week. Was a really great time. Some of the after hours anagrams games blew my mind.

Eddie L. at the Portland club got me into distance running and that’s been my main hobby the past decade or so. I’ve gotten really into the NYT Crossword and Spelling Bee, too.

I’ll check out the site!

I despise crosswords and love Wordle. to me they are completely different kinds of games. While a huge vocabulary helps with wordle, it's not required, especially since the answer dictionary itself is mostly common words.

> How many people don't play the NYT Sunday Crossword b/c they never get more than a few words?

The NYT Crossword Minis is actually really popular within my friend group. It's usually about 8-10 words.

Actually, it’s 5x5 (typically). So five letter words again, just like Wordle. Again, likely not a coincidence.

Whilst solvable, there's still a skill differential in the scoreboard. So in group-chats, everyone "solves" it, but the person who does it in 2 gets to celebrate (but a chunk of it is luck so it rotates a bit).

"reasonable perceived effort" or maybe "reasonable perceived smarts". I think wordle fools us into thinking we're smart. Even though on some level we know it cannot take genius, it _feels_ like we've done something really clever, against the odds, when when we whittle down the possibilities to one word after just few guesses. It's counter-intuitive how quickly we solve it. Reminds me of the birthday paradox.