Fibble

People have developed a lot of trust with Wordle. It’s why there’s such absolute uproar every time anything goes vaguely wrong, whether it’s two different answers being served up to different people, or the entire game being bought by a megacorp. So what better than a variant of the game that deliberately lies to you?!

Fibble does just that, giving you a starter word, then eight further guesses to get the solution, except in every result it’s lying about one of the letters.

So if you’ve got a starter saying “TRIBE”, with a yellow T and green I, the rest gray, any one of those pieces of information could be rubbish. There might well be a B in the answer. Or the I might not be in the right place, or even in the word at all. You have to figure out a route through this based on guessing what it’s fibbing about.

Obviously you can find your way to such information by repeating letters in given squares, and seeing if there are contradictions. For instance, after “TRIBE” I tried “STICK”, and this time was told that the I was a yellow, and the rest of the letters are grey. Which tells me one of two things: Either the first row was lying about there being a T at all, or lying about the I being in the right place. So therefore the second row is lying about one of the same two letters.

As you go you can mark the tiles you suspect to be false in each answer, to try to keep track of things. But gosh, yeah, no, this is not simple. It is, however, rather brilliant.