Extreme mode

[LWChris]

Add extreme mode (bans grays and same-position yellows). Changes the way the game tracks hints to allow for specific highlighting of conflicting hints (also beneficial for hard mode).

[teleshoes]

i like this. it is not, as i thought at first, weird and silly and useless.

an interesting game-within-game is to try and lose in 'extreme' mode. (this is never, in fact, easy, and is not always possible).

my main tactic in regular mode is what i imagine to be the most common one; guess 2 or 3 ground-covering words, and then basically play extreme mode, with a few exceptions if i think of a clever test. it turns out those exceptions are VERY useful, and my average play time on extreme mode is significantly higher than on regular or hard mode.

[LWChris]

I also feel it is a bit harder to lose in extreme mode, since, you cannot waste turns as easily as with hard mode. It does quite often take more thinking effort than hard mode, and sometimes it takes several minutes to come up with a guess that's allowed.

I do enjoy playing a challenge, that consists of starting each round with a word that starts on a different letter from the alphabet. So first guess of first round needs to start with A, first guess of second round with B, etc. Since extreme mode will limit your choices a lot from the second guess onwards, depending on what you got from the first guess, each round tends to feel much more unique since your repertoire of go-to guesses almost never meets the requirements. I feel playing that challenge in extreme mode has significantly improved the variety of my guesses. 🙂

[LWChris]

Hi! Just wanted to be clear that from my side this PR is ready to be pulled. The hints would be a separate PR later once I get to them. 😄

[LWChris]

I rebased my commits on your master branch. But I think you need to fix something in the CI because everything fails in setup.