How to play Wordle: colours, repeated letters and six guesses

Where the game came from

Josh Wardle created Wordle. In his Game Developers Conference 2022 talk, he describes its journey from a personal gift to a widely played game. A hidden word and a limited number of guesses make each piece of feedback matter. The creator’s account is linked in the sources; the rules below describe our Rich Games version.

In Word Games (@WordleRichBot), Wordle shares a bot with Fillword. These are different word puzzles: Wordle asks you to test hypotheses about a hidden answer; Fillword asks you to find words on a visible grid. Ordinary modes let you choose either game. Rich Games is an independent project, and this bot is not the official NYT Games product.

Six guesses, three kinds of feedback

Choose Wordle and a word length: Easy uses four letters, Medium five and Hard six. Every difficulty gives you six guesses. Send a whole word as an ordinary message from your phone keyboard in the bot’s private chat. The board updates after an accepted guess; there is no separate on-screen letter keyboard.

Green means the letter and its position are correct. Yellow means the letter belongs elsewhere in the answer. Grey means no match remains for that occurrence, after other tiles have been accounted for. Feedback belongs to each individual occurrence: the same letter can be green and grey within one guess.

New answers follow the English or Russian interface language. Switching languages does not replace an existing game. Russian Ё is treated as Е; letter case and surrounding spaces do not matter. A wrong length, another alphabet or a word outside the dictionary costs no guess.

Make the next guess answer a question

A starting word with several different letters can test a useful range of possibilities. Read the whole feedback row before moving on: which positions are fixed, which letters need to move, and which occurrences have been excluded? A guess that repeats a disproved placement often gives less information.

When several answers look similar, compare which guess would distinguish them. Sometimes a fresh allowed word tests several relevant letters at once. Our version permits that approach: it does not force every later guess to preserve all previously discovered letters. The useful choice depends on the candidates and guesses remaining.

Near the sixth guess, reassess the tradeoff. An information-only word helps only if you still have a chance to enter the answer afterwards. With two candidates and one row left, spending that row on an unrelated test cannot secure a win.

Repeated letters: why one A can be green and another grey

Consider the teaching answer PLANT and guess CRANE. C and R are grey, A and N are green, and E is grey. The result fixes the third and fourth positions but does not tell you P, L or T. A second guess should use those constraints or deliberately test another useful set of letters.

Now take the teaching answer APPLE and guess ALLEY. A is green. The first L is yellow, the second L grey, E yellow and Y grey. The answer contains only one L, so only one of those two guessed Ls can receive a match. Yellow letters are assigned after all exact matches have been removed from consideration.

An exact match takes priority even if a competing duplicate comes earlier in the guess. With answer PLANT and guess LLAMA, the second L and third A are green; the first L, M and final A are grey. The green L has already used the answer’s only L, and the green A its only A. Those grey duplicates do not mean L and A are absent.

Common feedback mistakes

Yellow does not mean keep that letter in the same slot. It means that occurrence needs a different position. A grey copy does not erase a green or yellow copy elsewhere in the row. Think about counts as well as membership: the clues constrain how many occurrences can match.

A word outside the bot’s allowed dictionary cannot test any letters and uses no guess. Choose a different real word of the required length. Send one word at a time; a sentence explaining your reasoning or several candidates in one message is not a valid move.

Wordle, Fillword and one shared Daily

Open @WordleRichBot, select Wordle and start with four letters. Wins award 10, 25 or 50 points according to word length. Winning on your sixth guess still earns the full reward. Losing reveals the answer and awards no points. A valid unsuccessful guess is not a platform mistake and carries no time penalty.

The Word Games Daily alternates between Wordle and Fillword by UTC date. There is one ranked attempt per day across the bot, and losing also uses it. On Wordle days the answer has five letters and a win earns 75 points. English and Russian use separate answers. Changing the interface language does not grant another Daily.

The date changes at 00:00 UTC. For another puzzle, choose an ordinary mode. Word Games combines both games in its monthly leaderboard and labels them separately in statistics. The website practice has a small stated vocabulary for learning feedback; full games, the real catalogue and points live in Telegram.