A Wordocious daily game mode
5 escalating stages, 21 boards, one run — the endurance test
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The Gauntlet is a five-stage marathon that gets harder as you go — 21 hidden words in total, all in one continuous run. Stage 1 is a single word on one board; later stages ask you to solve several words at the same time, up to eight boards at once in the finale. Each stage gives you a set number of guesses. Solve every word in a stage to advance; if you run out of guesses on any stage, the whole run ends right there. Tiles color to guide you: PURPLE for a right letter in the right spot, AMBER for a right letter in the wrong spot, GRAY for a letter that is not in the word.
Between stages you get a quick recap of what you cleared and what is coming next. Your guesses, time, and score add up across all five stages — the Gauntlet is scored as one long game, not five short ones — so pace yourself.
Win base 1,000, 60 points per unused row of your forty-four across the whole run, up to 48 speed points under the thirty-minute cap (a tiebreaker — never worth a full row), and completion credit proportional to boards cleared: each of the 21 boards is worth about 9.5 points of the 200-point completion pool, and partial runs keep partial credit.
The recorded guess count is the sum across every stage, which is why an efficient early stage matters: a three-guess stage one and a five-guess stage one look identical on your screen at the time, but they are 2 guesses apart on the leaderboard forever.
Late stages have enough boards that scores converge — everyone grinds them. The separation happens on the small early stages, where solving in three instead of five is realistic. Treat stage one like a speedrun.
Each stage has fresh words, so your coverage resets too. Don’t improvise: walk in with two or three preplanned opener words that share no letters between them, and reuse that same set at the start of every multi-board stage.
When a stage gets dicey — two rows left, two boards open — switch to pure survival. A slow, ugly stage clear keeps 100% of your future scoring alive; a bust forfeits every stage you would have cleared after it.
The time cap covers the entire run, but speed is only a tiebreaker now — rows are the currency. Take the time you need to solve efficiently; a deliberate run that saves three rows beats a rushed one that finishes ten minutes faster, every time.
Want more? Read the full Gauntlet guide or browse our strategy articles.