Symble

About Symble

Symble takes Wordle's starting point, a secret five-letter word and a handful of guesses, and turns the feedback into a second puzzle. Its maker, Daniel Baamonde, says plainly that the strategy is quite different from Wordle's.

Every game uses three randomly chosen symbols, such as a heart, a sun or a water drop. One means the letter is in the right place, one means it is in your guess but in the wrong place, and one means it is not in your guess at all. You are not told which symbol means what; you work that out as you play.

The symbols also do not line up with your guess. After each guess you get five symbols, one for each position of the answer. In the game's own example the answer is SHAKE and you guess THICK. The H of SHAKE gets the symbol for a correct placement, because THICK has H second too. The K gets the symbol for a misplaced letter, because THICK has a K but elsewhere. S, A and E get the third symbol, because THICK has none of them. So the feedback describes the answer, not your guess, and you have to read it backwards.

Repeated letters have their own rule. If the answer has two of a letter and your guess has only one, a correctly placed letter is marked where it sits, and a misplaced one is marked on the earliest place that letter appears in the answer. You have eight guesses, and when the game ends the grey tiles of your guesses flip to show the colours they should be matched to.

The Daily Puzzle is one of five modes. In it everyone gets the same word, and it refreshes at midnight in your own time zone. The others are Infinite, with random words; 5 Minute Blitz, where you solve as many puzzles as you can against the clock; Live Blitz Battle against a random opponent or a friend; and Custom Puzzle, where you make a puzzle from any five letters and share its link. You can share your results and see your statistics from the menu.

How to play Symble

1. Open the Daily Puzzle and type a five-letter word as your first guess.
2. Read the five symbols beside the row: each one belongs to a position of the secret word, not to the letter you typed there.
3. Work out which symbol means right place, which means in your guess but misplaced, and which means not in your guess; the meanings change every game.
4. Use what you have decoded to choose your next guess.
5. Find the word within eight guesses.

Tips

• Use your first two guesses to pin down which symbol means a correct placement; a word with no shared letters makes it easier.
• Remember the symbols sit on the answer's positions, so a misplaced mark tells you where a letter of yours belongs, not where you put it.
• Mind repeated letters: a misplaced letter is marked only on its first place in the answer.

Questions