Aura Clue

About Aura Clue

Aura Clue is a daily word hunt played against the dictionary. Each guess is placed in alphabetical order and scored by distance: the game tells you about how many words sit between your guess and the hidden one, and on which side the answer lies. A word thousands of entries away shows as cold, a few hundred away as warm, and a handful away as hot, with a coloured bar that fills and shifts toward red as you close in.

That makes it a cousin of the before-or-after word games, but with more to go on. A plain before or after only halves the range; the word count tells you whether to jump a letter or two ahead or to stay within the same few spellings. The guesses stack up on the page as a list, so you can see the hot and cold words that bracket the answer.

The puzzle is numbered and dated, and the Archive page shows a month calendar marking each day as solved, in progress or not solved, so missed days can be played later. A Stats page keeps your record. There is no sign-in, and the game can be switched to Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, French or Dutch as well as English. It is made by Ana Puzzle, whose other dailies include Number Island and Sortdle, and it carries ads beside the board.

How to play Aura Clue

1. Type any English word in the guess box and press the arrow.
2. Read the result: about how many dictionary words lie between your guess and the answer, and whether the answer comes earlier or later.
3. Guess again inside the range you now know, watching the bar move from cold toward hot.
4. Keep narrowing until you type the hidden word itself, which ends the day's puzzle.
5. Open the Archive to play an earlier day you missed.

Tips

• Start with a word near the middle of the alphabet so the first answer cuts the range in half.
• Use the word count, not only the direction: a gap of ten words means the answer shares most of its first letters with your guess.
• Once you are within a few hundred words, change one letter at a time near the front of your guess.

Questions