Word Duel
Crack the secret five-letter word in six tries — and race a simulated rival to the solve.
Type a 5-letter word
Use your keyboard or the on-screen keys, then press Enter to lock in your guess.
Read the colours
Teal means correct spot, orange means the letter's in the word but wrong spot, dark grey means it's not in the word.
Beat your rival
A simulated rival is solving at the same time — watch their progress bar and see who cracks it first.
Opening words and letter coverage
Your first guess in Word Duel does more work than any other, because it's the only guess where you have zero information to react to. A strong opener favours common, distinct letters over trying to guess the answer outright — a word like STARE or CRANE covers five different high-frequency letters (E, A, R, S/T, C/N) and rarely wastes a guess on a repeated letter you already know the status of.
After your first guess, resist the urge to just find any word that fits the known colours — prioritise guesses that also test new letters you haven't tried yet, especially in the first three rounds. A guess that confirms a correct letter but tells you nothing new about the other four is a guess spent narrowing slower than it could. This matters more in Word Duel than in a untimed puzzle, since your simulated rival is guessing in parallel and a wasted round can be the difference between beating them to the solve.
Watch the letter frequency in the built-in word list rather than assuming general English frequency — Word Duel draws from a curated five-letter list, so certain letter combinations (double vowels, less common endings) come up more often than they would in unrestricted English. If you're consistently running out of guesses on the same handful of words, it's usually a sign to diversify your opening word rather than to change your solving order.