How to play Six Tries

Six rows, and the six is the whole budget

One word is drawn and lands on every screen in the room at the same second. You play a five-letter word into a row, and each of its letters comes back with one of three answers: it is in the word and where you put it, it is in the word somewhere else, or it is not in the word at all.

The budget is not a setting and will not become one. What makes the fourth row feel expensive is the arithmetic of how many more times you can afford to be wrong, and a table allowed to raise the number would raise it once and never get that back.

A letter is counted, not spotted

The one rule that separates a correct build of this from a plausible one. A letter you use twice is answered twice only if the word really holds two of them — use two at a word holding one and exactly one of them lights up: the one in the right place if either of them is, and otherwise the first. Most versions get this wrong, and a version that gets it wrong looks right until the row where it quietly lies to you.

Every mark carries a shape as well as a colour, so the board reads without being able to tell the two colours apart, and the keyboard under it shows the strongest thing you have proved about each letter rather than the most recent.

You may guess any five-letter word the dictionary has heard of, which is several thousand more words than the answer can ever be drawn from. That asymmetry is deliberate: being told your real word is not a word, in front of colleagues, is much worse than an odd one being accepted.

You can see how far everybody is, and nothing else

While the word is live, all anybody learns about you is how many rows you have spent and whether you are home. Never a letter. Everybody is solving the same word, so one row of somebody else's working is worth exactly as much as one of your own, and a screen that showed it would be handing the room a way to read your deductions over your shoulder.

You can also say you are out. It takes two presses because it cannot be undone, your grid stops where it is, and the room stops waiting for you — which is worth having, because one person stuck on row four holding five others at a spinner is how a race stops being one.

Then it all goes face up at once: the word, and every grid beside every other, at the size where you can compare them. That is the best part and it is why the table is capped at eight rather than for any reason in the rules.

Three words, and no prize for typing fast

A sitting is three words, about thirteen minutes with the reveals, and the three together are what is ranked. Your score for a word is the row you found it on and nothing else.

There is no bonus for finishing first, and refusing one is a decision rather than an omission. On a video call, first is a measurement of typing speed and how good somebody's connection is, and paying for it would reward the fast guesser over the good one. Rows are the honest measure, and two people who both needed four are honestly level.

Questions people ask

Is this the daily one everybody posts a picture of their grid from?

It is adapted from it — the credit at the foot of this page says whose it is — but it is not it. This one is a race: everybody in the room is dealt the same word at the same moment and plays their own grid, a sitting is three words rather than one a day, and there is no streak, no midnight and nothing to share. The answers are drawn from our own dictionary at its commonest frequency bands, not from anybody's published list, so knowing today's does not help you here.

Can everybody else see what I typed?

No, and not by policy — by construction. What every screen is told about every seat is a count of rows and whether that seat is finished, and it is literally the same object for all of them. A test in the suite takes two rooms that differ only in what somebody typed and fails if any other player's screen can tell them apart. At the reveal, when the word is over, all the grids go up together.

Do I need a big vocabulary?

No. The word is always drawn from the three commonest bands of the dictionary, so it is a word you already know — the difficulty is finding it in six rows, not having heard of it. Rare words are still allowed as guesses, which occasionally helps, but the game is deduction rather than recall.

Can I play it on my own?

No, and it is one of the few here that says so. Two is a real floor: one person racing nobody has no scoreboard and no reveal to sit through, which is most of what makes this a thing to do together. There are no stand-in chairs either — anything we could build would either know the word or never finish a row, and neither is an opponent. Word Chain is the one to open if you are on your own.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Six Tries?

No. It runs in the browser everyone already has open. One person opens a room, reads out the six-character code or pastes the link into the channel, and everyone else is at the table in a couple of seconds.

Do we need accounts?

No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address anywhere in the flow. You pick a name when you sit down, and that is the whole of it.

How many people can play Six Tries?

2 to 8 — best with four. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Six Tries take?

About 13 minutes, which is the length of a coffee break rather than the length of a games night. Nobody is the host in the sense of holding the controls, so a round finishes whether or not everyone is still looking at it.

Does it work over a video call?

That is what it is for. The game is on the screen and the talking is on the call — nobody has to describe a board to anybody, and the parts that must stay private stay on the server rather than being read out.