How to play
Guess the five-letter word in six tries. After each guess, every tile changes colour to tell you how close you were.
The colours
Green — the letter is in the word and in the right place.
Yellow — the letter is in the word, but somewhere else.
Grey — the letter is not in the word at all.
Repeated letters, properly explained
This is the rule that trips people up, and most explanations skate over it. The number of coloured tiles for a letter never exceeds the number of times that letter appears in the answer.
Suppose the answer is abbey, which has two bs, and you
guess bobby, which has three. Greens are assigned first, then any
remaining copies of the letter in the answer are handed out as yellows, left to
right. The third b gets nothing — not because it is in the wrong
place, but because the answer has run out of bs.
A grey tile does not always mean "this letter is absent". If the same letter appears elsewhere in your guess in green or yellow, grey means "no more of these". Worth remembering before you rule a letter out entirely.
Opening words that actually help
A good opener maximises information rather than trying to be lucky. Two principles do most of the work:
- Five distinct letters. Repeating a letter in your first guess wastes a slot that could have tested a new one.
- Common letters first. In English,
e a r i o t n s l ccarry the most information.
Words like crane, slate, irate and
arose all satisfy both. There is no single best opener — anything hitting
those two rules performs within a fraction of a guess of the theoretical optimum.
A more useful habit than hunting for the perfect opener: when your second guess has several possibilities left, spend it testing new letters rather than shuffling known ones. Guessing a word you know is wrong, purely to eliminate four letters at once, is often the fastest route to the answer.
Streaks and statistics
One puzzle per day, the same word for everyone, rolling over at midnight UTC. Your streak continues as long as you solve consecutive days — miss one and it resets to zero, though your win rate and distribution are kept.
All of this lives in your own browser's local storage. There is no account and nothing is sent to a server, which does mean your streak is per-device and clearing your browser data will reset it.