A Wordocious daily game mode
1 word, 6 guesses — the foundation everything else builds on
Play today's daily Classic free. Sign in to save stats, streaks, and compete on the leaderboard.
New to word games? Here is the whole idea. There is a hidden 5-letter word. You have six tries to find it. Type any real 5-letter word and press enter — then the five tiles change color to tell you how close you were. PURPLE means that letter is correct and in the right spot. AMBER means the letter is in the word but in a different spot. GRAY means the letter is not in the word at all. Use those colors to make a smarter next guess, and keep going until the whole row turns purple.
One handy detail: repeated letters are scored one at a time. If the answer has only one E but your guess has two, only one of your E tiles will color — the extra E shows gray. That gray duplicate is itself a clue: it tells you the letter appears just once.
A win is worth a 1,000-point base, and guesses are what separate players: every guess you do not need is worth 300 points, so a three-guess solve banks 900 in guess bonus alone. Speed is the tiebreaker — up to 240 points scaled by how far under the five-minute cap you finish. Because the speed bonus maxes out below the value of a single guess, a faster solve can never outrank a more efficient one. Completing the board adds a flat 200.
A typical strong Classic score lands between 2,100 and 2,400: 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.
Want more? Read the full Classic guide or browse our strategy articles.