I didn't say it would extend it by more. This second suggestion of mine is playing within the rules to a greater extent than AW is, so you'd expect it to be less effective at increasing the number of moves required.
(At least, unless ingreatwaters's counterstrategy turns out to be extremely effective.)
But as an example, suppose we were playing Wordle using a dictionary consisting of just the words AAAAB, AAAAC, AAAAD, AAAAE and ABCDE. Clearly, as the guesser, I minimise the maximum number of moves by guessing ABCDE first, because if that isn't the right answer itself, it will always let me identify the real right answer on the second move. Whereas if I guessed one of the others, say AAAAB, then I wouldn't get enough information back from guess #1 to tell the difference between AAAAC, AAAAD and AAAAE.
So, if the setter picks their word equiprobably from the five available ones, then I win in one move 1/5 of the time and in two moves 4/5 of the time, for an average of 1.8 moves to win.
But if the setter wants to make my average as bad as possible, they should never pick ABCDE! Then my strategy will hit its worst case of 2 moves 100% of the time.
no subject
(At least, unless
But as an example, suppose we were playing Wordle using a dictionary consisting of just the words AAAAB, AAAAC, AAAAD, AAAAE and ABCDE. Clearly, as the guesser, I minimise the maximum number of moves by guessing ABCDE first, because if that isn't the right answer itself, it will always let me identify the real right answer on the second move. Whereas if I guessed one of the others, say AAAAB, then I wouldn't get enough information back from guess #1 to tell the difference between AAAAC, AAAAD and AAAAE.
So, if the setter picks their word equiprobably from the five available ones, then I win in one move 1/5 of the time and in two moves 4/5 of the time, for an average of 1.8 moves to win.
But if the setter wants to make my average as bad as possible, they should never pick ABCDE! Then my strategy will hit its worst case of 2 moves 100% of the time.