Wordle

I really enjoy Wordle.

But somehow, my brain is busted from years of playing games like Jotto and Mastermind as a child, so I keep making dumb mistakes.

Today, for example, I got stuck because I thought that Wordle's word list did not allow repeated letters; that is, that a valid Wordle word was five distinct letters.

I, of course, was wrong. Repeated letters are in fact allowed in Wordle.

And that's true of Jotto, also, I guess, although in my family I recall that we disallowed repeated letters in our secret words (though, importantly, not in the guess words). Wikipedia notes that this was a common "table rules" decision when playing Jotto. And the version that MentalFloss describes was quite strict about the no-repeated-letters rule.

I guess I'm not the only person who sees Wordle in this historical context: Wordle’s massively popular (Jewish) predecessors

I am a child of the 60's, after all (though not Jewish).

My parents played Mental Jotto with me as well; it was quite the mental workout! We didn't take walks to the synagogue, but, living in Southern California, we did often find ourselves going on multi-hour drives (that's what Southern Californians do for fun, after all), and Mental Jotto definitely passed the time! Clearly we weren't the only ones who did this.