1 word, 6 guesses — the foundation everything else builds on
Guess the hidden five-letter word in six tries. Every guess must be a real word — random letter dumps are rejected. After each submission the tiles flip: purple means the letter is in the word and in the right position, amber means it is in the word but somewhere else, and gray means it is not in the word at all.
Repeated letters are judged individually. If you guess a word with two of the same letter and the answer only contains one, exactly one tile colors and the duplicate shows gray — that gray duplicate is a clue in itself, telling you the letter appears only once.
A win is worth a 1,000-point base. You then earn one point for every second left under the five-minute cap — solve in 1:30 and the time bonus is 210. Completing the board adds a flat 200. There is no separate guess bonus in Classic; fewer guesses pay off indirectly because they make you faster.
A typical strong Classic score lands between 1,350 and 1,450: solve in three or four guesses inside two minutes and you are competitive on the daily leaderboard, where everyone worldwide plays the same word.
Your first guess exists to gather information. Words like SLATE, CRANE, AROSE, or RAISE test five high-frequency letters with no repeats, so every tile teaches you something. Resist opening with a "lucky" word that repeats letters — a duplicate tells you nothing new.
Players fixate on purple and amber, but eliminations shrink the candidate pool fastest. After two guesses you typically know 8–10 letters that are NOT in the word — mentally filter your next guess through that exclusion list before typing it.
An amber letter has at most four remaining legal positions. If you have two ambers, pick a next guess that relocates both at once instead of testing them one at a time. Moving R from slot 2 to slot 4 while moving E from slot 5 to slot 3 resolves two unknowns with one row.
Five-letter answers disproportionately end in -ER, -ED, -LY, -AL, and -TY, and start with S, C, B, T, or P. When you are down to your last two guesses, bias toward these patterns rather than exotic letter arrangements.
The leaderboard tiebreaker is time. Memorize one opener and one follow-up (e.g. SLATE then CORNY covers ten distinct letters) and type them without thinking. Save your deliberation budget for rows three onward, where it actually changes outcomes.
Every mode ships a fresh daily puzzle at your local midnight — the same words for every player worldwide, with a daily leaderboard per mode. Play today's Classic puzzle.