Golfdle

A three-hole course per day. Each hole hides a five-letter word and carries a declared par (4, 5 or 6) that indicates both the word's difficulty and the margin you have. You get seven guesses, and it is the row on which you find the word that determines the score: finding it early is worth a birdie, an eagle or better, and lingering costs you a bogey. The three holes add up on a scorecard that shows the total par and your difference.

1. Type a five-letter word and confirm with the Enter key.
2. Read the row's colors: letter correctly placed, letter present but elsewhere, letter absent.
3. Watch the label for the row you are on, which indicates what the hole will be worth if the word falls there.
4. Play the three holes in sequence. The scorecard at the top accumulates the results and shows the total relative to the course par.

The transposition is very well executed. In an ordinary word game, finding it on the fifth try or the second is roughly the same. You won. Here each guess has a price shown to the left of the grid, and the game becomes risk management: attempt the unlikely word or secure par. Add a tournament calendar with titles and trophies, and the thing gets serious.

Feedback is twofold, and that's the whole point. The colors tell you exactly how the word is doing, just like in a classic word game. The left column, meanwhile, shows what each additional attempt costs, using entirely golf vocabulary, from hole-in-one to triple bogey, via condor and albatross. So you always know not only whether you're getting closer, but how much the search has already cost.

Practice

Training days, Monday through Wednesday according to the rules panel, with their own leaderboard tab.

Tournament

Thursday through Sunday, four rounds whose scores add together. The panel specifies that the holes' pars are the same for everyone each day, but that the words differ from player to player, and that a missed round counts as a penalty score.

Grand Cup

An ongoing ranking fed by places earned in tournaments, reset each quarter in January, April, July and October.

• A hole's par is information, not decoration: a par 6 signals a tougher word but gives more guesses to get under par, a par 4 promises an easier word with very little margin.
• Without an account nothing is saved. If you're aiming for the leaderboard, a streak or a tournament, you must log in before playing, not after.
• The weekly schedule matters as much as the puzzles: tournaments run Thursday through Sunday, the other days are for practice, and skipping a tournament round costs a penalty score.