How to Play Octordle

The goal of Octordle

Octordle hides eight different five-letter words, one on each of eight boards. You have 13 guesses to find all eight. There is no separate guess per board: every word you enter is written onto every board that is still unsolved, and each board colors it against its own hidden word.

Because the eight words are always different, a single guess can solve at most one board. That simple fact shapes the whole game: a win needs at least eight guesses, so you have exactly five to spend on exploring, testing letters and recovering from wrong turns.

The game opens with random words and the hint Make your first guess!. Three icons at the top of the page open your statistics, the settings and the in-game help.

Entering a guess

Type a word on your physical keyboard or tap the on-screen keys, then press Enter. Use Backspace to fix a typo. Two checks happen before the guess is accepted:

• It must have the full number of letters. A short word shows Too short.
• It must be in the game's list of accepted words. Otherwise you see Not a valid word and nothing is used up, so you can simply try another word.

A rejected word never costs you a guess. The list of accepted words is much larger than the list of answers; the word list page explains the difference.

A worked example

Here is part of a made-up game, opened with SLATE and then CRONY. Those two words share no letters, so together they test ten different letters, nine of them among the ten most common in the answer list. Watch how the same two rows read on four different boards.

On board 1 the word looks like _LAN_, and T has to go in the first or last spot. S is gray, so it cannot be SLANT. Only one word in the answer list fits: PLANT.

Board 2 is the opposite. Nine letters are ruled out and all you know is that a T is somewhere other than fourth. Six words in the answer list still fit, so this board needs more information before you commit a guess to it.

Board 3 already has four of its letters. Two answers fit: one with a P and one without.

Board 5 has C at the start and Y at the end. A and N sit somewhere in the middle three spots, with A not third and N not fourth, and the last gap is a letter you have not tried yet. Only CANDY in the answer list fits.

Now the third guess. PLANT is certain on board 1, so playing it is a guaranteed solve, and it also tells the other boards something new:

On board 3, the gray P removes the only other candidate, so board 3 is now settled as well. On board 2, PLANT shows a yellow T in fifth place, which cuts its six candidates down to two. After three guesses, one board is solved, two more are certain, and the hardest board has a short list. That is the rhythm to aim for: every guess should either solve a board or make several others easier.

How the colors are decided

Each board compares your guess with its own word in two passes:

1. Every letter in exactly the right spot turns green. Those letters are set aside.
2. The remaining letters of your guess are checked from left to right. If the hidden word still has an unmatched copy of that letter, the tile turns yellow and that copy is used up. If not, it turns gray.

For words without repeated letters this is the familiar rule. Repeated letters are where the two passes matter. Say the hidden word on a board is OCEAN and you guess SPEED:

The second E is gray because the word's only E has already been matched. Gray here does not mean "no E"; it means "no second E". Greens are reserved first, even when they come later in the guess. Guess LEVEL on a board whose word is HOTEL:

When a yellow is possible, the leftmost copy gets it. Guess ERROR on a board whose word is ROBOT:

The rule is the same on every board, but the result can differ wildly from board to board, which is why one guess can confirm a double letter on one board and rule it out on another.

The split keyboard

With eight boards, one color per key would hide most of what you know. So every letter key on the on-screen keyboard is divided into eight blocks, two across and four down. Each block belongs to one board:

• Top row of the key: board 1 on the left, board 2 on the right.
• Second row: boards 3 and 4. Third row: boards 5 and 6. Bottom row: boards 7 and 8.

On a phone or a narrow window the boards are stacked in the same pattern, in four rows of two, so a block sits where its board sits. On a wide screen the eight boards line up side by side, numbered 1 to 8 from left to right.

Each block shows the best result that letter has earned on its board: green beats yellow, and yellow beats gray. Letters you have not tried stay light gray. A quick scan of the keyboard answers questions like "is E still possible anywhere?" without reading every board.

Solved boards

When a guess matches a board's word, that row turns fully green and the board is finished. Later guesses are not written onto it, its rows below stay empty, and its blocks on the keyboard keep the colors they had when you solved it. You do not have to think about that board again.

Running out of guesses

You win the moment the eighth board is solved. If your thirteenth guess goes in and any board is still unsolved, the game ends as a loss. Either way, a result window opens with the answers to all eight boards and the time you took.

Giving up

Once you have made at least one guess, a Give up button appears. It ends the game straight away, shows all eight answers and records the game as a loss in your statistics, so it will end a winning streak.

After the game

The result window lists the eight words, tells you how long the game lasted, and offers share buttons that send a challenge link to friends. Press Start over, or Enter, for a new game. In Random mode that is a fresh set of eight words; in Daily mode it is the next game in that day's shared series. Every finished game, won or lost, is added to your statistics.

Tips for your first game

• Open with two words that share no letters. Pairs such as SLATE and CRONY, or SCORE and LATIN, test ten common letters and give every board something to work with.
• Solve the easy boards first. A board with four letters known is usually one guess away, and that guess also feeds information to the other seven.
• Watch the keyboard, not just the boards. A key that is gray in seven blocks still matters on the eighth.
• Do not panic about board 8. Five spare guesses is more than it sounds if most of your guesses are solves.
• Read a gray tile carefully when the letter repeats. It may only mean there is no second copy.

When you are comfortable with the rules, the strategy guide covers opening plans, board order and the endgame in more depth.