8 letter Wordle strategy
Multi-board play is a budgeting problem. This guide covers how the 8-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 eight letters changes
Each guess shows you eight letters. After two openers most boards have several coloured tiles, and wrong answers are rarely one letter apart. What makes it hard is vocabulary and spelling: every guess must be a real eight-letter word, and you have to think of one that fits.
Word families
Eight-letter answers cluster by ending more than by rhyme: ADDITION, AMBITION, AUDITION, LOCATION, POSITION, VACATION; or FEARLESS, HARMLESS, HELPLESS, HOMELESS, HOPELESS, RECKLESS.
A green ending such as TION or LESS only tells you the kind of word. Work on the front half: the first three or four letters are where eight-letter answers differ, so favour guesses that change those.
When to stop opening
Two openers with 13 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.