Antiwordle

Antiwordle inverts the instruction: you must avoid the hidden five-letter word for as many turns as possible. Each guess tightens the noose instead of loosening it. A letter absent from the word greys out and is banned from every later guess. A letter present turns yellow and becomes mandatory. A letter in the right place turns red and is locked to that square for good. On one grid, an opening on CRANE came back with three reds (C, R and A locked at positions one, two and three), leaving almost no room to manoeuvre by the second row.

1. Enter a valid five-letter word using the on-screen keyboard.
2. Read the colours: grey bans the letter, yellow makes it mandatory, red locks it to its square.
3. Build the next guess so it honours every constraint already obtained, a word that breaks one is refused without a message.
4. Keep going as long as you can without assembling the hidden word: the ideal run is the longest one.

The scoring runs backwards, and that changes every habit: here a long game is a good game, and the opening rich in common letters that serves you everywhere else is the fastest way to lose. The constraint machinery makes each guess costlier than the last, since red letters are locked in and grey letters are struck off the keyboard, the board closes in on the answer whatever you do. The settings panel keeps a CURRENT STREAK counter and reveals the previous day's word, so a run has a memory beyond a single sitting.

Three colours, and not one of them means what it means elsewhere. Grey: the letter is not in the word, and the keyboard bans it. Yellow: the letter is in the word, and every following guess must contain it. Red: the letter is in the exact right place, and it is locked to that square. The keyboard mirrors the board. After CRANE, C, R and A showed red and E and N grey. A guess that contradicts these constraints is simply refused: SPILT, submitted against three locked reds, stayed sitting in the row without ever being validated, with no error message and no new row appearing.

Daily grid

One new word each day, as announced on the home screen.

Hard Mode

A settings checkbox: letters marked yellow must change positions, and repeated letters marked grey cannot be reused.

Dark Theme

A display toggle sitting in the same settings panel.

• Red is the enemy: each locked letter removes a whole square from the search space. The opening rich in common letters, the reflex from the normal game, is exactly the wrong move here.
• Rare consonants and awkward positions are the resource. The goal is to draw grey, not to draw colour.
• A refused guess costs nothing visible, but it advances nothing either: the only counter that matters is the number of rows actually validated.