Improve help page

[geoff-m]

Based on the help page, I expected that seeing the same letter colored gray and another color to be impossible, since the help page says gray means the letter "doesn't occur in the word at all", while green and yellow both mean the letter does occur--obviously these situations are mutually exclusive. Since playing the game for half an hour or so, I was surprised to find two Rs in a word, one green and one gray! Given that the solution word contained exactly 1 R, I expected extra R's to be yellow in color, since as the help page says, yellow means the letter "occurs elsewhere in the word".

So possible solutions would be

• Start coloring extra repeated letters yellow in accordance with the help page.
• Don't change how things are colored, but change the help page so that the descriptions of gray and yellow are accurate.

Nice game btw

[dskunkler]

I think that what you experienced is actually correct. If there is one r and you put two r's only one would be colored because only one r exists in the word, the other r does not exist and is therefore black. It's actually more helpful to you since you can try two letters and know if it occurs twice or not. Updating the help page with a good example is probably best.

[dskunkler]

@lynn a good possible example of this could be the word rate with guesses bard (a correct, r wrong place), and rare (ra is right, second r is black, e is correct), rate is correct.

[geoff-m]

The logic that actually drives the game necessitates thinking of each guessed letter not just as a letter but as a letter plus a number that counts which occurrence of that same letter it is in the guess. For example, if the solution word is GASSY, the feedback for the guess ASSES would be A (1) - Yellow because the first A is in the word but not in the first position S (1) - Yellow because the first S is in the word but not in the second position S (2) - Green because the second S is in the word and in the third position E (1) - Gray because the first E is not in the word at all S (3) - Gray because the third S is not in the word at all

Although it's not mentioned in the rules, numbering the guess letters like this (at least the non-distinct ones) is necessary for the clues to make sense. If we try removing that numbering from this example, we get A - Yellow because A is in the word but not in the first position S - Yellow because S is in the word but not in the second position S - Green because S is in the word and in the third position E - Gray because E is not in the word at all S - Gray because S is not in the word at all and these clues are not self-consistent: S cannot be simultaneously in the word (as the 2nd and 3rd clues say) and not in the word (as the 5th clue says).

The problem is that reading the rules sets you up with this second, inconsistent view of how the game works, whereas people who have played the game long enough know that it's incorrect and instead view the game in the way I first described or some equivalent.