Three ways to play this with other people
5 min read
Most daily word games are solitary by construction. One puzzle, everybody gets the same word, and the social part is comparing scores afterwards — which is companionship, but it is not really playing together.
This game has three ways to play with other people, and one of them is the original format from 1955. Here they are, worst to best.
1. The daily, side by side
Everyone gets the same word for the same puzzle number, and the day turns over at your own local midnight rather than an hour picked in another timezone. So a group in three countries is genuinely on the same board, just at different moments.
When you finish, the share card shows the shape of your run — one tally per guess — and never a letter. That is deliberate and it is what makes the card safe to paste into a group where half the people have not played yet:
| A share card | What it gives away |
|---|---|
| ◼0 ◻2 | Nothing. Two letters were somewhere in the word. |
| ◼1 ◻2 | Nothing. You made progress. |
| ◼3 ◻1 | Nothing. You were close. |
| ◼5 🎉 | That you solved it in four. |
The limitation is real, though: you are all solving the same puzzle alone, in parallel. Nobody is playing against anybody.
2. Seeds — send someone a specific board
A seed is a link to one particular word. Everyone who opens it gets the same board, at any time, for as long as the link exists. It looks like this:
wordtallyo.com/s/r92f8k
The character after the slash encodes the board — e, r or h for the four-, five- and six-letter boards — so the link carries everything it needs and cannot lose half its meaning on the way through a group chat.
How to make one
- Finish any run — daily or practice, solved or not.
- On the results panel, press Make a seed to share.
- Copy the link and send it.
Three a day, free. Seeded runs are unranked and unscored by design: there is no leaderboard to protect, so your browser holds the word and the whole thing works with no network at all once the page has loaded.
3. The 1955 way, which is still the best one
This game’s feedback rule is inherited from Jotto and Bulls and Cows, and those were two-player games first. The original format needs no software at all, and it is better than anything above because you are actually opposing someone:
- Each player secretly writes down a word of the agreed length.
- Take turns guessing each other’s word.
- After each guess, the person who owns the word reports two numbers: how many letters are in the right place, and how many are in the word but elsewhere.
- First to name the other’s word wins. If you both get there on the same round, it is a draw.
Two pieces of paper. That is the entire apparatus. The reason to play the digital version first is that scoring a tally by hand is genuinely error-prone — miscount one repeated letter and the game is quietly broken for both of you — so it is worth playing a few boards here until the counting rule is automatic.
The counting rule, so nobody argues
Claim the exact-position matches first, then match what is left against the letters that are still unclaimed. No letter is ever counted twice, and the two numbers can never add up to more than the length of the word. That ordering is the whole of it, and it is where every pencil-and-paper disagreement comes from.
Which to use
| You want to | Use |
|---|---|
| Compare results with a group | The daily, and paste your share card |
| Set a friend a specific challenge | A seed link |
| Settle something | Two bits of paper, Jotto rules |
| Practise without spending your daily | Practice mode |
Picking a board for a group
For someone who has never played, start them on Easy — 4 letters, 10 guesses, and no score at all, so there is no clock draining while they work out what the numbers mean. It is unscored precisely so a first game can be slow.
Do not, however, tell them it is the gentle one. It has more guesses because a four-letter tally is a blunter instrument than a six-letter one, and by solver measurement it is the hardest board of the three.
For a group that has played before, Hard is the one to race on: 6 letters, repeats allowed in the answer, and no warning when one is present.
Questions people ask
Is Wordtallyo free?
Yes. There is nothing to pay and no account required. The daily puzzle, practice mode, the leaderboard and the stats page are all free to use, and nothing in the game is held back for anyone who plays anonymously.
How many guesses do you get?
Ten on the four-letter board, and eight on the five-letter and six-letter boards. The limits are uneven because they were measured rather than chosen: each is the ninetieth percentile of a solver working through every answer in the pool, plus one.
When does the puzzle reset?
At midnight in your own timezone, not at an hour picked somewhere else. Everyone receives the same word for the same puzzle number; you simply reach it when your own day turns over.
Can two people play the same seed at the same time?
Yes. A seed has no session and no shared timer — everyone who opens the link gets the same word and plays it independently. Compare share cards afterwards; they will have the same number of rows only if you took the same number of guesses.
Does a Wordtallyo seed link expire?
No. The word is derived from the characters in the link itself, so the same link always gives the same word. Nothing is stored on a server, and nothing to store means nothing to lose.