OMRET

OMRET is TERMO backwards — and that's the whole idea. It's a full Wordle clone with one rule change: the goal is to not find the word.

Two editions, same game, same identity:

OMRET	/pt-br/	Português (Brasil) — the default
Wordle Reversed	/eng-us/	English (US)

The root URL asks which language you want, remembers the answer, and sends you straight there on every later visit. Share the root link when you don't know the person's language; share the direct link when you do.

The rules

Every guess is marked exactly like normal Wordle. But the marks aren't hints — they're obligations on your next guess:

Mark	Wordle meaning	Here
🟥 Red	green — right letter, right spot	Locked. Welded to that slot for the rest of the game.
🟧 Amber	yellow — right letter, wrong spot	Must move. Every amber letter must appear in every later guess, each time in a slot it has never occupied. You can never quietly drop one.
⬛ Gray	absent	Dead. You may never type that letter again.
▨ Hatched	gray, but the letter is locked or amber elsewhere	No more copies. REFER against RETCH greys the last R — the word's only R was already claimed. R is still locked, so you must keep using it.

Survive five guesses without typing the answer and you win.

The two ways to lose: you type the answer, or you get cornered — the locks, obligations and dead letters squeeze until the only word you're still allowed to play is the answer. The trap closes on its own, and the game spells the word out for you when it does.

Portuguese and accents

The pt-BR edition works like TERMO: you type without accents and letters match without them, but the board shows the proper spelling. Type acoes and the tiles reveal A Ç Õ E S. Internally every word is an accent-stripped key and DISPLAY maps it to its real spelling, so ç matches c and õ matches o without any special cases in the rules engine.

Running it

Static, no build step, no dependencies — but it must be served over HTTP, since ES modules don't load over file://:

python3 -m http.server 8000
# http://localhost:8000

After editing tools/template.html, regenerate the two locale pages:

node tools/build.mjs

Deploying to GitHub Pages

git init
git add .
git commit -m "OMRET"
git branch -M main
git remote add origin git@github.com:<user>/omret.git
git push -u origin main

Then Settings → Pages → Deploy from a branch → main / root. Subdirectories work as-is, so you get:

https://<user>.github.io/omret/          language chooser
https://<user>.github.io/omret/pt-br/    OMRET
https://<user>.github.io/omret/eng-us/   Wordle Reversed

All asset paths are relative, so it works the same under a custom domain (omret.com.br/pt-br/) with a CNAME file at the root.

Run node tools/build.mjs before every push. It regenerates the locale pages and stamps a content hash onto every asset URL, which is what stops players from running a stale build.

Why the cache needs handling

GitHub Pages serves everything with Cache-Control: max-age=600 and gives you no way to change that, so for ten minutes a browser is entitled to reuse the old files. Three things address it:

1. Hashed asset URLs. The build hashes the CSS and JS and stamps ?v=<hash> on every reference. New build, new URLs, guaranteed fetch.
2. The hash is passed down the import chain. A query string is not inherited by a module's own imports, so a versioned game.js would still pull a cached engine.js — a fresh entry point wired to stale internals, which is worse than no cache busting at all. game.js reads its own version back off import.meta.url and appends it to every import it makes.
3. version.json catches stale HTML. Hashing cannot help a page whose HTML is itself cached, because that HTML points at the old hashes. On load the page fetches version.json with cache: 'no-store' and, if it disagrees, reloads through a URL the CDN has never seen. A sessionStorage guard means it can only do this once per deploy, so a bad fetch can never loop the page.

The one case still not covered is a tab left open across a deploy without being reloaded; it keeps playing the old build until the player revisits. Fixing that properly needs a real CDN in front, not Pages.

Link previews

Every page carries Open Graph and Twitter card tags with absolute image URLs, so a pasted link unfurls with a real card in Slack, WhatsApp, Discord and X. The three images in assets/ are 1200x630 JPEGs.

They are screenshots of tools/social-card.html, which draws the card in the game's own colours at exactly 1200x630. To change one, edit that file, open it at ?locale=pt or ?locale=en in a 1200x630 viewport, and save the screenshot over the matching file in assets/. The root card reuses the Portuguese one, since the chooser leads in Portuguese.

Layout

index.html          language chooser (self-contained, no shared assets)
pt-br/index.html    generated
eng-us/index.html   generated
css/style.css       shared
js/engine.js        rules — pure functions, no DOM
js/game.js          rendering, input, persistence
js/i18n.js          every interface string, both languages
js/words-pt.js      2,000 answers + 3,350 extra, plus accent spellings
js/words-en.js      2,315 answers + 10,657 extra
tools/template.html single markup source for both editions
tools/build.mjs     writes the two locale pages
js/sfx.js           synthesised sound, no audio files
tools/simulate.mjs  offline balance testing

Both editions run the same game.js against the same engine.js; only the word module and the string table differ. engine.js has no DOM dependency, so the simulator and the browser play by byte-identical rules.

Balance

node tools/simulate.mjs 400 pt     # or: en

Survival rate at 5 guesses with every amber moving. Higher means easier.

Edition	Guess pool	random	rare-letter dodge	conserve-alphabet
Português	full dictionary (default)	52.5%	82.0%	91.0%
Português	common words only	28.7%	63.0%	76.3%
English	full dictionary (default)	59.0%	96.5%	96.0%
English	common words only	24.3%	75.0%	72.8%

The two languages reward different strategies, which was not designed. It falls out of the dictionaries. English answers are full of rare consonants you can dodge into, so hunting obscure letters wins. Portuguese answers share vowels far more heavily, so obscure letters make contact anyway and conserving your alphabet wins instead.

Findings from the simulator:

1. The guess dictionary is the difficulty, and nothing else comes close. On the full English dictionary a deliberate dodger survives 96.5%, and tightening the rules barely moves it. Restricting guesses to common words is the only lever with real range, worth 20 to 25 points in either language. It now ships off, so the default game is the forgiving one and "Common words only" is where the difficulty lives.
2. More guesses makes this game harder, not easier, the opposite of Wordle. Surviving is winning, so every extra turn is another chance to get cornered.
3. Starving is unreachable. Running out of every legal word never happened in any variant, in either language, including under a strategy built to force it. STARVED_IS_LOSS still handles it, but it isn't a real ending.

Settings

• Language — switches edition. Each keeps its own stats and streak.
• Common words only — off by default. Turning it on is the single biggest difficulty increase available, worth 20 to 25 points of survival rate.
• Every amber must move — on by default, and the intended rule. Off relaxes it so moving any single amber letter satisfies the turn.
• Show words remaining — live count, escalating through five colour bands as the trap closes, with a −1,886 chip showing what the last guess destroyed.
• Word pool panel — testing aid listing every word, struck through and demoted as it becomes unplayable. A side column on desktop, a bottom sheet on phones (tap the counter).
• Sound — on by default. Every interaction has a voice: keystrokes, the reveal of each tile, the pool collapsing, the trap closing, and the win.
• Practice mode — unlimited random rounds; doesn't touch stats.
• Dark theme and a colour-blind-friendly high contrast palette.

Sound

Every effect is synthesised at play time from oscillators, envelopes and filtered noise in js/sfx.js. Nothing is loaded, so there are no audio files to license or host, no extra requests, and it costs a few kilobytes.

Pitch carries meaning rather than decorating it. A dead letter lands low and dull, an amber letter sits in the middle, a locked letter rings high and hard because it is the dangerous one, so a row is legible with your eyes shut. The cornered sequence works down into sub-bass, and the win is the only major arpeggio in the game, so relief sounds different from everything else.

Browsers refuse to start audio before a gesture, so the context opens on the first key or tap. The Sound setting mutes everything.

Word lists

Portuguese is built from the IME-USP Brazilian word list ranked by OpenSubtitles frequency, keeping the 2,000 most common five-letter words as answers. English uses the public Wordle answer and allowed-guess lists.