Word500

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A tougher Wordle: you learn how many letters are right, not which ones.

Play Word500

on word500.com

An empty Word500 board with green, yellow and red count columns beside each row

Word500 is a word game for power players. Like Wordle you guess a five-letter word, but each guess only tells you how many letters are in the right place, how many are in the word but misplaced and how many are wrong, not which ones. You play the daily once and deduce the rest.

About Word500

Word500 takes the Wordle idea and removes the easy part. You still guess five-letter words to find a hidden one, but instead of colouring each letter, the game shows three counts beside each guess: a green number for letters in the right place, a yellow number for letters in the word but elsewhere, and a red number for letters that are not there.

That turns the game into a deduction puzzle closer to Mastermind: you have to work out which letters the counts refer to by comparing guesses. The board gives you eight rows.

Each day brings three daily words, one per level: Standard has no repeated letters and no J, Q, X or Z, Standard+ only rules out repeats, and Advanced allows anything. Each daily is played once and the new ones arrive at midnight UTC. Beside the dailies there is an unlimited practice mode, a five-minute timed mode, a speedrun of ten words and an archive of past daily puzzles.

It suits experienced Wordle players who want a puzzle that takes real logic rather than letter-by-letter feedback.

How to play Word500

Guess any five-letter word.
Read the three counts: right place, wrong place, not in the word.
Compare guesses to deduce which letters the counts mean.
Keep narrowing until you find the word within the rows available.

Screenshots

Today's Word500 daily on a desktop with two guesses, STARE and CLOUD, and their green, yellow and red counts

Tips

Change one or two letters between guesses so you can tell which letters moved the counts.
Use guesses with no repeated letters early on.
Keep notes; deduction across several guesses is the whole game.