5 escalating stages, 21 boards, one run — the endurance test
The Gauntlet chains five stages of increasing board count into a single run — from a lone Classic board up through multi-board finales, 21 boards in total. Each stage has its own guess budget; run out of rows on any stage and the entire run ends there.
Between stages you get a review of what you cleared and what is coming. Your time and guess totals accumulate across the whole run — the Gauntlet is scored as one long game, not five small ones.
Win base 1,000, one point per second under the thirty-minute cap, and completion credit proportional to boards cleared across the entire run: 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 suite resets too. Don’t improvise: the same two or three preplanned openers you would use in QuadWord or OctoWord apply to the corresponding Gauntlet stages.
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. A relaxed two minutes on early stages costs little, but aim to bank at least fifteen minutes for the multi-board finale — running dry on time bonus during stage five erases the careful play that got you there.
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 Gauntlet puzzle.