Strategy: working out the letters

In Word Mastermind each guess tells you only how many different letters it shares with the secret word, never which ones or where (the rules in full). The secret word always has 5 different letters. Everything below follows from those two facts.

What a single score tells you

• 0: none of the guess's letters are in the word. Rule them all out at once: on Medium, mark them out, and they turn grey in every guess.
• 5 without a win: you have all five letters in the wrong order. The answer is an anagram of your guess.
• Anything else: that many of the guess's letters are in, and the rest out. You don't know which yet, but the next guesses will tell you.

Cover the alphabet first

Open with words that share no letters, each made of common letters. If two such guesses score 5 between them, every letter of the secret word is among their ten letters, and the other sixteen letters of the alphabet are all out.

crane – 2, then plots – 3. The scores add up to 5, so the word is made only of C R A N E P L O T S.

Change one letter at a time

Once you have a few scores, guess a word that differs from an earlier one in a single letter:

• The score goes up by 1: the new letter is in, the one you dropped is out.
• It goes down by 1: the dropped letter is in, the new one is out.
• It stays the same: the two letters are both in or both out. Another guess will settle which.

After crane – 2, crate – 2 swaps N for T with no change, so N and T are both in or both out.

Use letters you've ruled out

A letter you know is out adds nothing to a score, so it makes a good filler: put one or two in a guess to test the other letters on their own. A guess may repeat a letter, too: eerie tests only E, R and I, so its score is about those three alone.

Check your marks

Every letter you mark in or out has to agree with every score so far. On Medium, Check for mistakes in the ☰ menu tells you whether your marks still fit the scores. On Easy, the game marks the letters for you, using only this letter logic, never the word list.

Then find the word

Once you know the five letters, or most of them, think of words that use them. Only the exact word wins, so if several words fit, guess the one that would tell you most if it's wrong. In the example above, the word was plant.

Against an opponent

In a two player game you're racing: the first to find the other's word wins, and if the first player finds it, the second gets one final guess to draw. A guess that might win now can beat a safer one that only narrows things down, especially when your opponent is close. Pick a secret word with uncommon letters to make yours harder to find.