Phoodle

Phoodle keeps Wordle's grid intact (six rows of five letters, a keyboard underneath, green for the right spot, yellow for the right letter in the wrong place, grey for absent), and narrows the dictionary to one subject: food. The answer is always a cooking technique, a kitchen gadget, an ingredient or a dish, which the help panel states outright.

1. Type a valid five-letter word using the on-screen keyboard.
2. Read the colours: green is the right letter in the right place, yellow the right letter elsewhere, grey a letter to abandon.
3. Lean on food vocabulary rather than general openers. The answer is always culinary.
4. Close the word within six rows; a new Phoodle appears each day.

The narrowed dictionary changes the arithmetic. In Wordle any five-letter word is fair game; here the answer belongs to a vocabulary you can actually enumerate, so a cook's instinct beats a wordsmith's opening. That cuts both ways. The field is smaller, but the words are specific enough that a good general opener wastes turns on letters food words rarely use. It plays in the same two minutes as the original, with a fresh word each day.

The three familiar colours, applied to the tiles and mirrored on the keyboard: green means the letter sits in the right spot, yellow means it belongs to the word but elsewhere, grey means it is absent entirely. The help panel illustrates each with a food word (TACOS for green, FIBER for yellow, BAKED for grey) which doubles as a hint about the kind of vocabulary to expect.

Daily word

One food word per day, shared by everyone, as the help panel states.

Free account

An optional sign-up that saves progress and stats across devices, promoted inside the help panel.

• Open with a word that is both a common opener and edible (SAUCE, ROAST, BREAD), so a miss still costs nothing in food-specific letters.
• Remember the categories the game names: techniques and gadgets, not only ingredients. WHISK and BRAISE-family words are as likely as a vegetable.
• The keyboard is the real scoreboard once two rows are down: it greys out faster than the grid reads, and it shows which food letters remain.