Quordle

Quordle displays four five-letter grids side by side and a single keyboard. The word you type drops into all four at once, and each grid judges it against its own hidden word: the same guess therefore comes out with four different colorings. The historic address quordle.com now redirects to Merriam-Webster, which hosts the game and opens on a dated selector offering five ways to play the day, plus a locked weekly challenge.

1. Choose a mode on the dated screen (Classic, Extreme, Chill, Sequence, or Rescue) and press Play.
2. Type a five-letter word: it is placed simultaneously into all four grids.
3. Read the four colorings separately, each grid having its own word to find.
4. Continue making guesses until you knock down all four words, within the guess budget of the chosen mode.

Quordle's tension doesn't come from word difficulty but from the economy of guesses: nine tries in Classic for four words is barely more than two per word, and each guess is necessarily a compromise among four boards that aren't asking for the same thing. The mode selector is what keeps the appointment interesting: Chill to catch your breath, Extreme to tighten things up a notch, Sequence to break the parallelism, Rescue to inherit a disaster to fix. And the weekly challenge only opens by paying its daily toll.

Feedback arrives grid by grid, never globally: the same guess can be fruitful in one grid and silent in a neighboring one. That's the crux of the game, since the guess budget is shared across the four.

Classic

9 guesses to solve 4 words, per the selector card.

Extreme

8 guesses, with words presented as more unusual.

Chill

12 guesses, with fewer unusual words.

Sequence

Solve one word at a time, according to the card wording.

Rescue

Take over a badly started game from the computer, per the wording « Fix the mess the computer made ».

Weekly Challenge

Locked on the home screen, with the note « Unlock by solving a Daily Classic puzzle ».

• The mode choice sets the budget even before the first word: the selector cards list 9 guesses for Classic, 8 for Extreme and 12 for Chill; Extreme also adds vocabulary described as rarer.
• One guess equals four readings. Before typing the next one, reread all four grids, not just the one that moved.
• The weekly challenge stays locked until a Daily Classic grid has been solved: it's the only way shown to unlock it.