Adieu

Adieu was a word-guessing game in the spirit of Wordle—six tries to find a five-letter word—with a solver built in that graded the game afterwards, guess by guess.

It ran on its own at adieu.xilinliu.com as a single hand-written HTML file. In September 2026 I folded it into Acacia, where it now lives as Wordler, the first tab. The standalone is retired and the old address points at Acacia.

Why I Built It

I loved the daily ritual but always wanted more than the three-line stats popup. Not just did I win, but: was that a good guess? How much of the field did it actually clear, and what would the best available word have cleared instead? So I rebuilt the game and wired a solver into the end of it.

The Grader

When a game ends, every guess gets scored on expected remaining answers—partition the words still in play by the pattern each guess would produce against them, and a guess is good when that partition is fine-grained.

• Opening word: its average solve length and rank against all 12,972 legal openers, from a precomputed table
• Every later guess: how many words were still possible, how many your guess left standing, where it ranked among the alternatives, and the best word you could have played
• Opener comparison: yours against the popular starters—including adieu itself, which the site was named after and which turns out to be the weakest of them

That last one is my favourite detail. When I folded the game into Acacia I wrote a balance sweep that replays hundreds of seeded games under a solver, partly to see whether the old table's ranking held up. It did: adieu came last, exactly as the precomputed data always said. I named the site after a mediocre opening word and did not find out for months.

What Changed in the Move

The original kept its state in the DOM—it read your guess back out of the tiles—so it could never restore a half-played board. Rebuilt around a pure game core, it now survives a reload mid-game. The 723KB solver table no longer loads with the page either; it is fetched only once a game has actually ended.