What is a Near Miss?
Near Miss is a word puzzle played in reverse, in which you must get through six guesses without ever typing the hidden five-letter word, while every guess has to obey what the coloured rows above it have already revealed.
Also known as: Don't Wordle, reverse Wordle, Wordle played to lose.
How do you solve a Near Miss?
- 01
Open with rare letters
Everything you learn becomes a rule you must follow, so learn as little as possible. An opener made of uncommon letters such as J, Q, X, Z and V will probably come back all grey, which bans five letters you did not want anyway and leaves the legal pool enormous.
- 02
Watch the counter, not the colours
The number at the top is how many words you could still legally type. It is the whole game. A guess that leaves it in the thousands is safe; a guess that drops it to double figures is a warning; when it reaches one, that word is the answer and you have to type it, which is how you lose.
- 03
Avoid greens at all costs
A green letter is locked into its column for every guess that follows, and each locked column removes most of the dictionary. Before typing a word, ask which of its letters could plausibly sit where you have put them, and move any that seem likely to land.
- 04
Undo before the trap closes
You have five undos. Use one the moment a row leaves you with only a handful of legal words, because the next row may leave you with one. An undo spent early on a bad row is far cheaper than a forced final guess.
Common Near Miss mistakes
- Playing a normal opener. A word full of common letters like SLATE or CRANE is the worst possible start, because every hit becomes a constraint you can never escape.
- Forgetting that a yellow has to keep appearing. A guess that drops a known letter is refused, so you have to plan where it can go while staying yellow.
- Saving undos for the end. When the counter shows one, an undo only takes you back to the row that caused it; the time to undo is when the count first collapses.
- Reusing a grey letter. It is not allowed, the guess is turned away, and the message telling you why is time you could have spent thinking.
Where does Near Miss come from?
The idea of a five-letter guessing game you win by losing arrived in 2022, soon after Josh Wardle's 2021 Wordle had made the format familiar and its sale to The New York Times had made it famous. The joke only works because of hard mode: if guesses could ignore the clues, avoiding the answer would be trivial. Forcing every guess to honour the greens, yellows and greys turns avoidance into a real puzzle.
Near Miss is this site's own implementation of that puzzle type. The answer pool is the same as Daily Five, the constraints are the standard hard-mode rules, a count of the words still legal is shown at the top of the board, and five undos are available for when the count gets too low.
How many guesses do you get in Near Miss?
Six rows, and the aim is to fill all six without any of them being the answer. Each guess must obey the hard-mode rules set by the rows above it, and you have five undos to take back a guess that has cornered you.
Is Near Miss free, and how often is there a new word?
It is free and needs no sign-up. A new word is set every day at midnight UTC. There is no timed mode for this variation, because a game you win by not finding a word has nothing to race. It plays on a phone as well as a desktop.