How to play Totle
Totle is a calm daily word puzzle. Guess today's four-letter word in up to ten tries. After each guess you get one number. That's the only feedback — no coloured tiles, no per-letter hints, just a single score.
The score is built from two counts you never see separately:
- Every letter of your guess that sits in the right place is worth two points.
- Every letter of your guess that is in the word but in the wrong place is worth one point.
Add those up and you get one number from 0 to 8. A score of 8 means you've solved the puzzle. A score of 0 means nothing in your guess matches the target. Anything in between hides its own split — a 4 could be two letters in the right place, or one letter in the right place plus two letters in the word, or four letters in the word and none in place. Unpacking that split is the whole puzzle.
Press Enter to submit, Backspace to delete. Invalid words (not in
the word list) or duplicate guesses are rejected inline and don't cost a try.
Reveal shows the answer with no penalty; you still get a shareable, marked
as revealed.
The twist
Wordle hands you a colour grid per guess — which letters are green, which are yellow,
which are grey. Word500 collapses that grid into two counts: how many letters
are green and how many are yellow. Totle takes one more step and collapses
those two counts into a single number: 2 × greens + yellows.
That single number is the genuine twist. You never learn which position was correct or which letter was in the word. You only learn the combined score. A score that looks identical can come from very different overlaps — and narrowing down which overlap you actually hit is where the deduction lives.
Strategy
- Open wide. Your first guess is worth more if it covers high-frequency letters and no repeats. A word like ROAM or LINT rules out or confirms four different letters in one shot.
- Score 0 is gold. A zero tells you all four letters are absent from the target. That eliminates a quarter of the alphabet in one guess — often the single most informative result you can get.
- Score 1 and score 2 are ambiguous. Score 1 means exactly one letter is in the word but in the wrong place, and the other three are absent. Score 2 could mean one letter in the right place (and the rest absent), or two letters in the word but wrong place. Try a second guess that keeps one letter in the same spot and swaps the other three — the score shift tells you which split you were looking at.
- Pair guesses to pull signal apart. If two guesses differ in only one letter, the difference in their scores tells you something precise about that letter. That's the deductive crowbar.
- Never grey out the keyboard. Totle's keyboard stays full on purpose. If the keys faded as you used them, the fade would leak positional information — which is exactly what the game hides.
Worked example: unpacking a 4
Say you guess ROAM and score 4. That's 2g + y = 4, which splits three ways: two greens plus zero yellows, one green plus two yellows, or zero greens plus four yellows. You don't know which.
Guess ROAM with three letters shuffled but one letter held in place — say ROIL. If you score 4 again, the two shared letters (R and O, both in their original positions) are doing a lot of the work and the swap didn't change much. If you score 0, you know R and O were the yellows, not the greens. Two guesses, pulled apart.
Frequently asked questions
How do I play Totle on mobile?
The whole game lives in a 10-row board that fits comfortably on a 375px-wide screen. An on-screen keyboard keeps every letter in thumb reach, and each submitted guess prints its score to the right of the row.
What time does Totle reset?
Every puzzle is pinned to 00:00 UTC, so the whole world plays the same Totle on the same date.
Why only one number instead of greens and yellows?
By design. Handing you two counts — how many letters are in the right place, how many are in the word but wrong place — is how Word500 works. Totle collapses those into one score so you have to deduce the split yourself. That is the game.
Why doesn't the keyboard grey out letters I've tried?
Because a greyed-out key would leak positional information Totle is deliberately hiding. The keyboard stays full; every letter is always available.
More MinCalc games
Enjoyed Totle? Try Targle — guess the hidden equation that evaluates to today's target — or Sumrex, where you place one digit per row, column, and colour region so they add up, or Quackle, a calm pond-logic puzzle where each flock has to stay connected and no two ducks from different ponds touch.