Tips and strategy for Five Guesses
A clue looks like a puzzle about luck, but it is mostly elimination. These habits help you land on a fitting word in one try.
Build around the green tiles
Green tiles are the strongest information because they fix both a letter and a position. Write them down first, leave blanks for the rest, and only then think about what could fill the gaps. Starting from the fixed letters cuts the candidate list far faster than starting from the yellow ones.
Here A and L are green and B is yellow, so the word looks like _A_L_ with a B in the third or fifth spot. 5 words fit: CABLE, FABLE, GABLE, SABLE, TABLE.
Use yellow tiles to place letters
A yellow letter must appear in your word, but never in the spot where it is yellow. That rules out one position and leaves up to three. Combine every yellow with the green pattern and the open spots, and the placement often becomes obvious.
Read grey tiles carefully
Grey usually means the letter is absent, so you can drop it from your search. The exception is a repeated letter: if the same letter is coloured elsewhere in the clue, a grey copy only tells you there are no further copies. Check for this before you throw a letter away.
Think in word shapes
- Common endings such as -ED, -ER, -LY and -ING fill the last spots quickly.
- Double letters, such as LL, EE or SS, are easy to forget and fit many patterns.
- Vowel pairs like EA, OU and AI often settle the middle of the word.
- Letters that cannot sit side by side in English, such as a Q without a U, remove whole branches.
Accept any fitting word
You do not need the word the game had in mind. Any word from the list that produces the same colours is a correct answer, so when two candidates seem equally likely, simply submit one. If you want a tougher test where only one word works, try Hard mode.