Guides
Word Game Guides
12 guides, each written once and revised when the facts change, with the revision date on the page. Strategy comes with the method shown, so the advice can be checked rather than believed.
Written by Blake Boege
Wordle
Openers ranked by computation, strategy that costs guesses and strategy that saves them, and where the official Bot fits.
- Best Wordle starting wordsOpeners ranked by scoring every five-letter word in the dictionary on letter coverage and position fit, with the method shown.
- Wordle BotWhat WordleBot is, that it belongs to the New York Times and needs their subscription, and how to get the same analysis while the game is still live.
- Wordle for kidsA parent's guide to playing word games with a child, with the short word lists that suit early readers.
- Games like WordleDaily word and logic games grouped by what each one changes about the Wordle loop.
- Wordle strategyHow to spend six guesses, what hard mode actually costs, and which five-letter words are hardest, counted by how many others sit one letter away.
Scrabble and tile games
The rules, both games' letter values, and the short words that decide close boards.
- How to play ScrabbleSetup, turns, scoring, premium squares, challenges and the endgame.
- Scrabble letter valuesThe standard tile distribution: what each letter is worth and how many are in the bag.
- Words with Friends letter valuesThe 104-tile set tabulated: every letter value and count, and the twelve letters priced differently from Scrabble.
- Two letter Scrabble wordsA curated reference of two-letter words that play in Scrabble, each with a gloss and a tile score. Not the official list, and it says so.
Spelling Bee
What makes a word eligible, the genuinely hard ones, and study lists for the other kind of spelling bee.
- Spelling Bee wordsWhat makes a word eligible for the puzzle, the letter patterns that recur, and how to spot a pangram.
- Hard Spelling Bee wordsEligible words of nine letters and up, sorted longest first.
- Spelling bee words to studyFor a school spelling competition rather than the NYT puzzle: word lists graded by length and letter rarity, with the method explained.
Solvers live elsewhere: the word finder, the anagram solver and the word unscrambler answer a rack; these pages teach the games around it.