Hunch

Hunch is a daily word game by Bennette Sebastian that swaps Wordle's coloured letters for the counts of Mastermind. The answer is a five-letter word. After each guess the game shows two numbers: a green one for letters in the right place and an amber one for letters that are in the word but sit elsewhere. It never says which letters earned them, so the puzzle is working that out across your guesses.

Every board starts with a lead word already played and scored, so you have a first clue before you type anything. Guesses are not capped. Instead each daily has a par, the average number of guesses it takes (8.5 for today's Classic in English), and you try to finish under it. Letters can be marked on the keyboard as ruled in or out, and a pencil tool helps keep track of what you have deduced. A word the game does not know is refused with a cross and does not count.

There are three dailies. Classic is the single hidden word. Cascade chains several words into one longer run with a points score and its own par. Doubles is one word shared by two players passing a device between turns. Four difficulty tiers change how hard the daily plays, and an interactive tutorial teaches how to read the counts. A calendar holds the last month of boards, and signing in adds stats, streaks, leaderboards and Rivals, a live head-to-head mode.

The game runs in six languages, each with its own word list and keyboard layout: English (US and UK spellings), French, Spanish, German, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese. It suits players who find Wordle too easy and like a slower solve built on deduction.