10 letter Wordle strategy
Multi-board play is a budgeting problem. This guide covers how the 10-letter edition changes that budget and where its traps are.
Count your spare guesses
Subtract unsolved boards from guesses left. That number is your margin. A guess that solves a board keeps the margin; a guess that solves nothing lowers it by one.
The starting margin is small at every size:
- 1 board: 6 guesses, 5 spare.
- 4 boards: 9 guesses, 5 spare.
- 16 boards: 21 guesses, 5 spare.
- 32 boards: 37 guesses, 5 spare.
- 64 boards: 70 guesses, 6 spare.
- 128 boards: 135 guesses, 7 spare.
What ten letters changes
Each guess shows you ten letters, and two openers test more than half the alphabet. Deduction is rarely the problem. The work is recall and spelling: you need a real ten-letter word for every row, and one wrong letter in a long word is easy to miss.
Word families
Ten-letter answers are mostly a stem plus a long ending: COLLECTION, CONNECTION, CONVICTION, CORRECTION, PROTECTION, REFLECTION; or FRIENDSHIP, LEADERSHIP, MEMBERSHIP.
With ten tiles in a row, a single guess often turns a whole ending green across dozens of boards. From there the stem is a short puzzle of four to six letters, and the yellow tiles usually name it.
When to stop opening
Two openers with 15 different letters put clues on almost every board. After that, find a board whose answer is certain and enter it: you solve that board and add a row of clues to all the others.
At zero margin, every remaining guess has to solve a board for a full clear.
A scanning routine
Go through the boards in the same order each time and hide solved boards once the grid starts to thin out. Clear what is certain first, then return to the boards with few clues. The answers you entered in between may have settled them.