Guessing the word in six tries: the strategy that actually works
Why the first word matters so much, which letters to spend early, and the mistake almost everybody makes on the third guess.
The game of guessing a word in six tries — with the cells turning green, yellow and grey — became popular in 2021 and has not gone away. It has one virtue that explains a lot: each game lasts three minutes and you cannot play twice in a row, so it does not hook you in the bad way.
It also has a trap. Almost everybody plays it on instinct and stays stuck at the same average number of guesses for years. Three or four ideas bring that down considerably, and none of them require being good with words.
How the information works
Every guess returns three kinds of cell:
- Green: the letter is in, and in that position.
- Yellow: the letter is in, but somewhere else.
- Grey: the letter is not in the word.
The first thing to internalise is that grey is information too, and plenty of it. A word that returns five greys is not a wasted guess: you have just eliminated five letters of the alphabet at a stroke. In a deduction game, ruling out is worth as much as confirming.
And the whole strategy follows from that.
The first word: spend vowels, but not all of them
The first word is the only one you choose with no information, so its only job is to give you the maximum. Do not try to hit with it. Do not even try to get close.
A good opening word in English has:
- Three different vowels, including E and A, the most frequent.
- Common consonants: R, S, T, N, L.
- No repeated letters — a repeat spends a cell on something you already know.
Words like AROSE, RAISE, SLATE or ADIEU work well (pick according to the length in play). It does not much matter which of those you choose: what matters is that it meets the three conditions, not that it is the optimal one.
And one practical recommendation: always use the same one. Not out of superstition, but because you learn to read its results fast. If your opener is always AROSE, in time you see «A green, O yellow» and half a dozen candidates are already in your head without thinking.
The second guess: do not rush
This is the costliest mistake in the game, and almost everybody makes it.
You get two greens on the first try and instinct says: play something that keeps them. And so you spend guesses 2, 3 and 4 trying nearly identical words — CRANE, CRATE, CRAVE — differing by one letter. Each guess gives you one data point. With six guesses, that pace does not get there.
The alternative is uncomfortable and it works: if many candidates remain, spend a guess on new letters even knowing that word cannot be the answer. You sacrifice a turn to eliminate four consonants at once, and you arrive at the fourth guess with one candidate instead of seven.
Simple rule: if you can think of more than three words that fit what you know, do not guess yet. Eliminate.
Double letters, the blind spot
When you have four letters and cannot find the fifth, ask yourself whether one repeats. Words with a double letter — LLAMA, PUPPY, FLOSS, ABBEY — are the number one cause of games lost at the last hurdle, because the brain assumes all the letters are different.
Watch out for this too: if you play a word with two Rs and the answer has only one, the first R comes back yellow or green and the second comes back grey. That grey does not mean «there is no R»; it means «there is no second R». It gets misread constantly.
Adapting to the length
A four-letter word is not the same as an eight-letter one.
- Four or five letters: there are a huge number of candidates and little structure. Vowels rule.
- Six or seven: recognisable endings appear (-TION, -MENT, -NESS, -ABLE) and clusters like TR-, BR-, -LL-. There you can start deducing from shape.
- Eight: it is almost easier than six, odd as that sounds. A long word has so much structure that two or three well-placed letters leave very few options.
At MenteBrillante the Hidden Word puzzle steps up in length with your level — four letters at first, eight later on — and gives an extra guess from seven letters, because six guesses for eight letters stops being a challenge and becomes a lottery.
A summary in five lines
- The first word is not for hitting, it is for informing.
- Grey is worth as much as green.
- If more than three candidates remain, eliminate instead of guessing.
- Think of double letters when you get stuck.
- In long words, trust the endings.
If you want to try it, it is in the web version, along with the other fourteen puzzles.