How to read a daily game board: green, yellow, grey, and what to play next

Here is a board after two guesses. It is an invented board, made for this guide, and by the end of the page it will point at exactly one word. Your first guess was CRANE. The C came back grey, the R grey, the A yellow, the N grey, and the E green. Your second guess was APPLE. The A came back yellow again, the first P grey, the second P green, the L green, and the E green once more. Most players read that board as a pile of colours. Read properly, it is nearly a finished sentence. This guide shows how, colour by colour, including the trap sitting in the middle of it.

What each colour actually proves

Green is the only colour that tells you two things at once: the letter is in the word, and it sits in that exact square. The E from CRANE closes the word at position five, and it is not moving. The P and the L from APPLE sit at positions three and four. Fix greens first, and never spend a later guess moving one.

Yellow tells you the letter is in the word but not in the square you tried. It says nothing directly about where the letter does go. The A came back yellow in two different squares, position three in CRANE and position one in APPLE. One A, two wrong homes. Cornering a letter that way, by ruling out the squares it cannot occupy, is most of what the middle of a game is.

Grey is the colour players over-read, and the next section is about why. Taken on its own, a grey on a letter tried once, in a guess where it appears once, means the letter is not in the word at all. The C, R, and N from CRANE are dead. Cross them off and mean it.

The duplicate letter trap

Now look at the two Ps in APPLE. The first came back grey. The second came back green. If you crossed P off your list the moment you saw grey, you threw away a letter the board was about to fix in place at position three.

Here is the rule underneath. A guess never earns more coloured copies of a letter than the word actually holds. APPLE offered the board two Ps. The word holds one P, at position three, so the board coloured that one green and had nothing left for the other, which went grey. The grey P does not mean no P. It means no second P. The A tells the same story from the other side: the word holds one A, so every guess that parks it in a wrong square gets a yellow, and no board will ever show you two coloured As for a word that holds one.

This trap cuts in both directions. When a letter you guessed twice comes back with one copy coloured and one grey, the letter is in the word exactly once, and you know it. When both copies come back grey, the letter is simply out. And when a letter comes back yellow in two different guesses, as the A did here, you have fenced it into the squares that remain, which is often as good as a green.

Narrowing to a pattern

Lay the board out as a pattern and it reads like this. Position one, unknown, and not A. Position two, A, the only home left for it. Position three, P. Position four, L. Position five, E. Dead letters: C, R, N. One P only, one A only. Run that pattern against a word list and the crowd thins fast. Five-letter words that fit come down to a handful, and one of them, MAPLE, fits every fact on the board including the unknown first letter. That is what the colours were for. Two guesses did not just test ten letters; they fixed three squares, cornered a fourth letter, killed three letters outright, and counted two others.

Notice what did the work. It was not luck, and it was not that CRANE and APPLE are magic openers. It was reading each colour as a fact with limits, instead of as a feeling about a letter.

When to stop guessing answers and start guessing letters

Some boards narrow to a pattern with one open square and six words that fit it. Think of a board that has fixed S, H, A, and E with the third letter still open, where that letter could be D, K, M, P, or V. Guessing those words one at a time burns a turn per letter, and you can run out of turns with the answer still unguessed. That is the moment to change jobs. Play a word you know is wrong, chosen because it tests several of the candidate letters at once. A guess like PIKED cannot be the answer, and it tests P, K, and D in a single turn. Whichever of them colours, your next guess is the answer or close to it. You traded one turn for three answers.

The trade is wrong early, when the board is still wide open, and wrong on your last turn, when only a real candidate can win. It is right in the middle game, when the pattern is tight, the candidates share most of their letters, and information is worth more than a one-in-six shot.

Put your own board in

The Pangramist daily-game solver works the way this page does. It never knows today's answer, and it is not trying to. You enter the letters and colours from your own board, greens, yellows, and greys, and it returns the words from our list that still fit every fact, duplicates counted the way this guide counted the Ps. The board from this page is already loaded in it as the worked example, so you can watch MAPLE fall out of the pattern before you trust it with a live game. Open the solver, tap your colours in, and play the next guess yourself, better informed.