But Word Mastermind (like regular Mastermind) only tells you how many letters are in the correct spot, and how many are present but not in the correct spot. Whereas Wordle tells you specifically which letters fall into those categories. So it's not quite the same. (That's why Wordle only gives you 6 guesses, while Word Mastermind has 10 rows.)

Wow! That box cover image immediately brings me back to digging through the family board game box kept under my parents' bed. Vividly remember it, it was one of those mysterious/never-played games.

I remember that AT&T store! Note that mall is

https://www.simon.com/mall/the-mall-of-new-hampshire

They built it around 1980 when they built 93 as a ring road going around the city and I remember Sears immediately moving from a downtown location at the North End of Elm street to the mall and then most of the other department stores on Elm going out of business shortly thereafter.

As much as I could complain about the anti-pedestrian development of Southern NH that wants to be like a human lung and have exactly one path through the hierarchy from here to there [1] I can say my family did profit from Rt 93 because it caused the neighborhood I was in to develop so that the value of my house went up 1500%.

[1] this guarantees you'll encounter multiple traffic jams when multiple parts of the hierarchy get overloaded

It's probably more of a case of, "what's old is new again." While implementation undoubtedly has something to do with it, Wordle probably caught on this time around due to it's digital packaging, the popularity of things seems to go in cycles.

Well, Mastermind has 6 colors and 4 positions; Wordle has 26 letters and 5 positions. So at first it seems a larger solution space.

In Mastermind all feasible candidates are equiprobable (assuming the cluegiver isn't biased), but in Wordle we can use external statistical information (how likely is 'Y' to be letter #2? any letter?). Since Wordle uses a dictionary of 2331 possible words + 10657 additional words that can be used as guesses (so 12966 words in total). Out of a theoretical total of 4K five-letter English words, or 26P5 = 65780 five-letter permutations of letters (most gibberish). As such, you can often still gain information from trying a candidate word which you know cannot be the solution word (e.g. one letter known to be wrong position or missing).

HN does way too much "helpful" title normalization. @Dang pls fix

Do you know what 38,400 is in hex? 0x9600. That was a fun uart debug session.