How to play Fudgle

Fudgle is a five-letter word puzzle with one rule that changes everything: the game lies to you exactly once per row.

The part that works like you expect

You have six guesses to find a hidden five-letter word. Type a guess, submit it, and each of the five tiles comes back coloured. Green means the letter is in the word and in the right position. Amber means the letter is in the word but somewhere else. Grey means the letter is not in the word at all.

Every guess must be a real word from the accepted list. Anything that is not gets rejected without costing you a turn.

The part that does not

In every row of feedback, exactly one of those five tiles is false. A green might really be grey. A grey might really be amber. An amber might really be green. One tile per row, every row, and the game never tells you which one.

This means you cannot take any single tile at face value. What you can trust is the row: four of its five tiles are honest, you just do not know which four. Solving Fudgle is the work of finding a word that fits most of the evidence rather than all of it.

Two things the game guarantees

The lie is never planted to make you lose unfairly. Two rules protect you:

• A correct guess is never faked. If you type the answer, the row comes back all green and the puzzle ends immediately. The game will never show you five greens on a word that is not the answer, and it will never hide a win behind a false tile.
• Contradictions are real information. When the same letter comes back as a hit in one row and a miss in another, at least one of those two rows lied to you. The keyboard marks that letter with a split green-and-grey key and a violet edge. That is not decoration; it is proof, and it is the single most useful signal in the game.

Audits

You get two audits per puzzle. Tap Audit a row, then tap any row you have already submitted. That row re-colours to show what the feedback truly was, and the tile that lied gets ringed in violet.

Audits do not cost you a guess and they do not reveal any new letters. What they buy is certainty about evidence you already have, which is usually more valuable. Read when to spend your audits for the detail.

Winning, losing, and the streak

Solve the word within six guesses and your streak goes up. Miss it and the streak resets, and the board reveals every row as it truly was, with violet rings on all six tiles that lied to you. That end-of-game reveal is the best teaching tool in the game; it is worth reading properly rather than closing.

There is one puzzle per day and everyone in the world gets the same word, so the shareable result grid means something. Past puzzles stay open in the archive.

New players start here

If this is your first puzzle, do not try to be clever. Open with a word full of common letters, take a second ordinary guess, and only start reasoning about the lie once you have two rows of evidence to compare. One row of Fudgle feedback tells you almost nothing, because you cannot cross-check it. Opening guesses covers what to lead with.