How to play Five Guesses
Five Guesses turns the usual word-guessing idea around. You are not hunting for a hidden word. You are given the result and have to find a word that produces it.
The idea in one minute
Every puzzle shows a clue: a real five-letter word with a colour on each tile. The colours describe how that clue compares with a secret answer. Your job is to type any five-letter word that would produce exactly the same colours against the clue.
There is no hidden word to uncover, only a pattern to satisfy. That is why many clues have more than one correct answer, and why the game accepts any word from its word list that fits.
What the colours mean
- Green: the letter is in the right spot. Your word must have the same letter in the same position.
- Yellow: the letter is in the word, but not in the spot shown. Your word must contain it somewhere else.
- Grey: the letter is not in the word. Repeated letters are the one exception, covered below.
In this clue the R is yellow and the A is green, while C, N and E are grey. A fitting word therefore has A in the third spot, contains an R somewhere else, and uses none of C, N or E. SHARP fits.
Repeated letters
When a letter appears twice in the clue, the colours show how many copies the answer holds. If one copy is green or yellow and the other is grey, your word contains that letter exactly once. If both copies are grey, the letter is absent altogether. Counting the coloured copies first is the quickest way to avoid mistakes.
Tries, time and accents
Press Enter to submit. Every five-letter word that does not solve the clue counts as a try, whether it is missing from the word list or simply does not fit the colours. The clue stays the same until you solve it. The aim is to solve every clue on your first try, and the timer records how long you take.
You never need to type accents. The game folds them away, so a word with or without its accent is treated the same way.
After you solve a clue
The game tells you how many other words from the list would have fitted, which is a good way to learn new words. Your stats, streak and settings stay in your browser, and the colour-blind palette in Settings swaps the tile colours for a friendlier set.