peer2peergames

Word Duel

You each hide a five letter word and each try to work out the other's. Every guess comes back letter by letter: right place, in the word but somewhere else, or not in the word at all. The game is Jotto, published by Morris Jaffe in 1955, with one change: Jaffe told you only how many letters you had in common, and this tells you where they are.

Play Word Duel Leaderboard

The rules

  1. Each player secretly chooses a five letter word. It has to be one of the commoner words, so that the other player can reasonably find it.
  2. A letter may appear twice. SPEED and LLAMA are perfectly good words to hide.
  3. Both words are locked in before anybody guesses. Then you take turns guessing at each other's.
  4. You may guess any five letter word the site knows, which is a much longer list than the words you are allowed to hide.
  5. Every guess comes back with each of its five letters marked.
  6. A letter in the right place is marked as being in the right place.
  7. A letter that is in the word but not in that position is marked as being in the word.
  8. A letter that is not in the word, or has no copy left over, is marked as not in the word.
  9. Guessing a word you have already guessed is refused and costs you nothing: it is a slip, not a move.
  10. A word the site does not know is refused the same way, and also costs nothing.

What happens when a letter repeats

  1. This is the one rule everybody gets wrong, so it is worth reading twice.
  2. Each letter of the hidden word can only be spoken for once.
  3. Say the hidden word is CRANE and you guess ERASE. The last E is in the right place, and that uses up the only E the word has. So the E at the front is marked as NOT in the word, even though the word plainly contains an E.
  4. Now say the hidden word is SPEED and you guess ERASE. This time the word has two Es, so there is one to spare, and the E at the front IS marked as being in the word.
  5. The same guess, two different answers, and the difference is how many copies the hidden word has.

Winning, and the extra guess

  1. Five letters in the right place means you have found the word.
  2. Finding it does NOT end the game. Whoever went second always gets the guesses that make the counts equal, because otherwise going first would be worth something on its own.
  3. If they find it on that guess too, neither of you was faster and the game is a draw.
  4. Otherwise the player who found it in fewer guesses wins.
  5. Fewer guesses is better. This is one of only two games here where the score counts down.

How a game ends

  1. One player finds the word and the other fails to match them.
  2. Both find it in the same number of guesses, which is a draw.
  3. A resignation or a missed deadline ends the game against that player.
  4. Both words are revealed either way, so you always find out what you were hunting.

The word list is English

  1. The words are English and only English. That is a limit of the game rather than a gap in the translation: everything else on this page, and every sentence the game says to you, is in your own language.
  2. A word in another language will be refused however good a word it is.
  3. The list the site judges guesses against is the same one its other word games use, and it is much longer than the list your hidden word has to come from.

Neither player ever marks a guess. Each word is sealed with a hash before a single guess is made and published when the game ends, so anybody reading the log can check that the word somebody finished with is the word they started with. That matters more here than in a game of numbers: marking five letters by eye against a word with a repeat in it is easy to get wrong honestly, and this way nobody has to be trusted.

Word Duel terms

Right place
The letter is in the word and in that exact position.
In the word
The letter is in the word, but somewhere other than where you put it, and the word has a copy left over for it.
Not in the word
The word has no copy of that letter left to account for. Usually that means the letter is absent altogether; with a repeated letter it can mean every copy is already spoken for.
Sealing
Locking your word in. It is hashed before the first guess and published at the end, so it can be checked that it never changed.
The equalising guess
The guesses the second player always gets after the first player finds the word, so that going first is worth nothing.

Playing it here

  • Against a person or the bot. The bot needs no account and starts at once. To play a person, be rated and keep your games, you need an account: an email address and a password.
  • At your own pace. Every move has a deadline you both see, from one minute to a week. A game can take an evening or it can take a fortnight.
  • Nothing to buy and nothing to win. No stakes, no prizes, no boosts, no undo. The only thing on offer is a place on a leaderboard, and only if you want one.
  • Every game can be checked. Anything decided by chance comes from the game's seed, and the seed is published the moment the game ends, so any finished game can be replayed and verified by anyone. See fair play.