Tìngäzìk: a Retrospective – ep. 5 “Tonguess”

Tonguess

Expected solvable difficulty

• nohint+: experienced challengers
• keywords+: most solvers

Level design

Tonguess (Android, iOS) is an English word version of the Bulls and Cows game created by QuizKnock which I have talked about in depth on this blog. The question is built by showing a list of guesses and their outcomes, then ask for the actual word. All 4 questions are built with a modified version of the Tonguess Toolbox generating guesses based on the given word until a single answer is confirmed, with the first 2 questions guessing from random letter permutations, and the rest guessing from the Tonguess vocabulary.

The following words are chosen as the answers:

• QUIZ
  One of the most commonly guessed word in the game. Popular because of its creator QuizKnock, and the fact that it has a less common letter Q. A rather short sequence is chosen from all of the randomly generated ones as the question.
• WORD
  To show that the answer must be a word.
• FIND
  You need to find the word.
• RCMP
  The only word in the vocabulary of Tonguess that doesn’t have an A, E, I, O, U or Y. Seems to mean the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, not sure why this is included in their vocab.

Expected thought process

Looking at the question and figure out the #A#B column of the question is for a Bulls and Cows game (nohint+), or found it out in the keywords (keywords+). Then try to look for a 4-letter English word that matches the pattern.