How do eight boards work?
Each guess you type goes onto all 8 boards at once. Every board has its own hidden word and its own colours, so the same guess can be green on one board and grey on the next. You have 13 guesses in total. A board locks as soon as you solve it, and your later guesses only count on the boards still open.
With eight boards the keyboard shows a letter in grey only when it is missing from every board still open. Check each board for yellows and greens before you rule a letter out.
How should you spend thirteen guesses?
A common plan is three opening guesses, then about one guess per board. Three openers that share no letters test fifteen letters across all eight words. That leaves ten guesses for eight words, so you can afford two mistakes.
- Guesses 1 to 3: use the opening set below.
- Guesses 4 to 11: solve the board you are most sure about, one at a time.
- Guesses 12 and 13: keep these as backup for the boards with the most possible words left.
What trips people up?
- Guessing a word that fits one board but tells you nothing about the others.
- Forgetting that a grey letter on one board can still be green on another.
- Leaving the hardest board to the end, when there are no guesses left to test letters.
Deal with the board that has the most possible words while you still have guesses to spare.
At a glance
| Hidden words | 8, each 5 letters long |
| Guesses | 13 |
| Possible answers | 2,096 common words |
| Accepted guesses | 6,415 words |
| Daily puzzle | Yes, new at midnight UTC, plus Unlimited |
| Cost | Free, no account |
Which words should you start with?
We ranked every word in our list of 2,096 answers by how many answers contain its letters. These 3 openers share no letters, so together they test 15 different letters: RATES, LINGO, DUMPY. On average they uncover 82% of an answer's letters.
The letters that show up in the most answers are E (46.7%), A (40%), R (36%), S (30.5%), T (28.9%), O (28.3%). The most common endings are ER (5.3%), ED (4.1%), CH (2.5%), LY (2.1%), SE (2%). And 31% of answers use a letter more than once.