Word Guess

Type a word of the right length and press Enter. The board scores it letter by letter and hands the row back to you, and everything you do afterwards is deduction rather than luck. Six tries, no clock, and nothing is hidden from you except the answer itself.

The board here is chips on a felt table rather than a block of flat coloured squares, and the difference is not only decorative: seated and loose are an inversion of each other, a dark chip with a light letter against a light chip with a dark letter. That reads correctly in every form of colour blindness and in black and white, which a pair of adjacent hues does not. Every tile also states its outcome in words to a screen reader.

The measure that matters is not how many letters an opener hits, it is how many answers are still standing afterwards. Score a candidate opener against all 3,050 five-letter answers, group the answers by the pattern they would produce, and average the group sizes: that average is how much work your second guess still has to do. Tested against this game's own pool, these are the numbers.

Two things fall out of that table. First, the all-vowel openers people reach for are among the worst: adieu leaves twice as much work as tears and audio leaves more than three times as much, because vowels are crowded — every answer has one — and it is the consonants that separate words from each other. Second, S is worth far more at five letters than its reputation suggests: 25.7% of the answers end in S, so an opener carrying one is testing a quarter of the pool's last position for free.

This is the rule that decides roughly one round in three — 1,008 of the 3,050 five-letter answers contain a repeated letter, and at six letters it is 50.9% — and it is the rule almost every homemade version of this game gets wrong. The principle is that the answer has a fixed supply of each letter, seated matches are paid out first, and a letter marked loose is spent and cannot be marked again.

A sunk tile therefore does not mean "this letter is not in the word". It means no more of this letter is left to find, which is a stronger and more useful statement: a row that spends three E's on a word with one has proved the answer contains exactly one E, and that is worth more than most players realise.

Hard mode forces you to reuse what you have been shown. A letter seated at position three must stay at position three; a letter shown to be in the word must appear again, and if two copies have been proved then two copies must appear. It takes away the throwaway probe — the guess that ignores everything so far in order to test five fresh consonants — which is the strongest technique in the normal game.

• What it forbids: dropping a seated letter, or leaving out a letter known to be in the word.
• What it does not forbid: re-using a letter already shown to be sunk. Nobody means that by hard mode, and it would make some positions unguessable.
• What it can never do: block the answer. The answer always satisfies every constraint the board has produced, so hard mode cannot make a round unwinnable — a property the tests check across hundreds of rounds.
• What it costs you: at five letters, the average answers-still-standing figure roughly doubles on a bad second row, because you cannot spend a turn buying information.

Answers and guesses come from two different lists, and keeping them apart is the whole design. Answers are drawn from a 25,322-word list of everyday English — 1,967 at four letters, 3,050 at five, 4,045 at six — because an answer nobody knows is not a hard puzzle, it is a broken one. Guesses are judged against the full 172,823-word list, so anything real is accepted: 8,636 different five-letter words will be taken, not just the 3,050 that could be the answer.

Six letters looks like the gentle option because a longer word gives more pattern per row. It is not: half of the six-letter answers repeat a letter, and a repeat is the one thing that makes the feedback ambiguous. Four letters is the genuinely quick round — 1,967 answers, one vowel in two thirds of them, and usually settled by the fourth row.