Play 6 Letter Wordle Hard Mode

How a hard mode round works

1. Make a first guess with any valid six-letter word. The first guess has no limits.
2. Look at the line beside the New game button. After every guess it shows the letters locked in place and the letters your next word must contain.
3. Type the next guess. It has to keep each green letter in its position and contain each revealed letter, with repeats counted.
4. If a guess breaks a rule, a message appears in the same spot as “Not in word list,” for example that the third letter must be a certain one or that the guess must contain a letter. The row shakes and the guess does not use up a row.
5. Solve the word in six tries to win. Press New game or Play another round for the next word. Leaving an unfinished round counts as a loss, after you confirm.

The rules in detail

A green tile locks its letter to its position for the rest of the round. A yellow tile does not lock a position, but its letter must show up somewhere in every later guess. If one guess showed a letter twice, the next guesses need it twice. Gray tiles place no ban, so you can reuse a gray letter if it helps you fill a pattern.

When several things are wrong at once, the game reports the first position problem from left to right, and only then a missing letter. This matches the original Wordle hard mode.

GARDEN played in both modes

A script played the answer GARDEN twice, once in each mode, with the same opener. The opener is SINTER, the current leader of the starter ranking. In normal mode the second guess was KWANZA, a probe that tests four new letters at once. Hard mode refuses it. SINTER had already turned the E in fifth place green, and KWANZA has no E there, so the board would show “5th letter must be E.”

In hard mode the script had to use WROKEN instead, which keeps the green E, and it still reached GARDEN on guess three. Here the rule cost nothing. Across all 682 answers it cost one guess in 21 games, which the next section counts. This example leaves answer-list words from puzzle 151 on out of the solver’s guess pool, so the page does not show upcoming daily answers. The simulation below uses the displayed list.

What 682 answers played in each mode show

The simulation plays every answer in this game’s list once in normal mode and once in hard mode. At each turn the solver keeps the answers that still fit and picks the best-ranked guess for them, using the ranking code from the helper. Normal mode may choose from all 18,094 displayed words. Hard mode may choose only words that pass the game’s own rule check. The site’s ranking order decides: expected words left first, then the worst case, then the number of color patterns, then whether the guess could be the answer, then alphabetical order.

Neither mode lost a game. The average is 2.740 guesses in normal mode and 2.760 in hard mode. Hard mode needed one more guess in 21 games, the same number in 653 and one fewer in 8. The fewer cases show that the solver is greedy and not perfect: a smaller guess pool can by luck steer it to a shorter path.

The lesson is narrow but useful. A player who knows this game’s answer list loses almost nothing to the hard mode rule. Nobody sees that list, so the next section looks at what happens when you cannot rule words out.

Where hard mode traps you

A word family is a set of valid words that differ in exactly one letter, such as the words that fit _ATTER. Among the 682 answers the largest family has only 3 words, and just 5 families reach that size. The displayed list is different. It holds 107 families of eight or more valid words. The _ATTER family has 11 valid words and only 1 of them is an answer. A random sample of six is HATTER, NATTER, FATTER, WATTER, YATTER and LATTER.

A player cannot tell which family members are answers, so each one looks equally likely. The table treats them that way. Each member is the answer once, and guesses are counted from the moment five letters are fixed. In normal mode the solver may spend a guess on any word to test several differing letters together. In hard mode every guess must be a family member, so each guess tests one letter.

The gap is large. Normal mode finishes a family in about three guesses and never needs more than 4. Hard mode averages between 6.0 and 6.5 guesses, and a family of twelve can take twelve. If two guesses are already spent, only about a third of the members are solved within the four that remain, against 100 percent in normal mode.

What to do with that:

• Count the valid words before you commit. When four letters are green and you can name five or more words that fit, your fifth and sixth guesses are in danger.
• Test the differing letters early. A second guess that uses several new consonants beats locking in a pattern too soon.
• Guess familiar words first. Only 682 of the 18,094 words on the displayed list can be an answer, so most odd words never are.
• Use your yellow letters in new positions, because the rule lets you move them and each move gives new information.

How the simulation ran and where it falls short

The solver is deterministic. It keeps the answers consistent with all feedback, scores each allowed guess with the shared ranking code and takes the top one. Hard mode filters the guess pool with the same check the game uses. The family table repeats this with the family as the candidate set. A script produces both parts, and a test confirms that the stored numbers still match the code and word lists.

Three limits apply. The main simulation assumes the answer is one of the 682 listed words, which is true for the game and false for a human guessing blind. The solver is greedy, so it does not play perfectly. And the family table assumes every member is equally likely. Both lists descend from open Wordnik data, and our About page lists the credits and MIT terms. For opener choices read the starter ranking, and to count what still fits during a round, try the word helper.