Several word games involve guessing letters in a hidden word. These
include Hangman, and Word Mastermind, often known as Jotto (though
actually there is a subtle difference - in Jotto you are not told
the position of the 'hits'. In Mastermind (or as it is traditionally
known in Britain "Bulls & Cows") you are given both pieces of info:
correct letters (cows), and correct positions (bulls). Purists sometimes
scorn this version as too easy.
An even simpler variation of Word Mastermind, called Wordle, that uses 5-letter words is
currently the online flavour of the day (2022). The degree of redundancy in 5-letter
words is so high that Wordle games are usually solved in 2 to 5 guesses.
The "Wheel of Fortune" TV game is based on guessing a word as
letters are revealed, much like hangman. There are probably
sources for versions of this game on the net but I have not been
bothered to look for them as personally I find the game exceedingly
dull. I find harder games like
Countdown much more interesting.
WordBreaker by Erik Michaels-Ober
WordBreaker is an online version of Jotto, where you play against the
computer. Anagrams count as guessing the secret word, making the game more
about logic and deduction than luck. It supports between three and nine
letters per word, which allows you to control the difficulty of the game
while expanding your vocabulary.
Note that the code is GPL'd and therefore the source is available for download.
bsdhangman/
The classic game, in classic cursor-addressed terminal mode, for Unix in C.
hangwoman/
Perl script to play hangman over the web.
potm/moo/
The traditional British "Bulls & Cows" game. In C and in Java, with
good explanations. A version of this game used to come with Unix.
(There's also a Perl moo on the net but it guesses numbers, not letters
(like the original Unix moo did, I think))
Word Mastermind
This is my portable command-line version of Word Mastermind in C. It can play both as the player and
as the opponent. It uses a mildly Bowdlerised list of 4-letter words and is suitable for the youngsters.
letras/
More bulls and cows, in French. And Javascript.
Genetic and Annealed Mastermind
Here are a couple of implementations of (and papers about) the strategy
of Mastermind, one implemented using a Genetic Algorithm and the
other using Simulated Annealing (which you can play here). These are not word-games but must be
extremely similar algorithms. It's simply a case of expanding the alphabet
and restricting the solution space. (Did I say 'simply'???)
There are some tangentially related games which might be worth
mentioning here:
