What is a Fusele?
Fusele is a word puzzle in which you find a hidden five-letter word in six guesses, where each row reports back under its own rule, shown before you use it: a plain row colours every tile, an exact-only row marks only correctly placed letters, and a sorted row gives the right colours in the wrong order.
Also known as: Wordle with row twists, mixed-feedback word game.
How do you solve a Fusele?
- 01
Read the row labels before the first guess
Each row shows its rule beside it before you type: Plain, Exact only or Sorted. Look at the whole column of labels and plan which guesses go where. A plain row is where you want your most informative word; a twisted row is where you put a guess whose main job is confirming something.
- 02
Spend an exact-only row on placement
An exact-only row shows green where a letter is in the right place and grey for everything else, and that grey means the row is not saying, not that the letter is absent. Use it with letters you already know are in the word, trying them in their most likely columns: greens confirm positions and cost nothing else.
- 03
Spend a sorted row on counting
A sorted row gives the correct number of greens, yellows and greys, sorted strongest first, with the positions stripped out. It is a perfect row for five new letters: it tells you how many of them are in the word and how many are placed, which prunes the field without needing to know which.
- 04
Keep the plain rows for words that could be the answer
Only a plain row can tell you a letter is truly absent and where a yellow sits, so use the plain rows to test candidate answers and to settle disagreements. When a plain row comes early, it is your real opener; when the only plain row left is the last, everything before it must already have narrowed you to one word.
Common Fusele mistakes
- Reading an exact-only grey as absent. That row only reports greens, so a grey there may well be a letter that is in the word in another place.
- Playing five new letters into an exact-only row. It can only confirm positions, and new letters in guessed positions will almost all come back grey and unexplained.
- Using a sorted row to place letters. Sorting destroys the position, so a rearrangement of known letters played there tells you nothing you did not have.
Where does Fusele come from?
Fusele belongs to the 2022 generation of games that took the daily five-letter format of Josh Wardle's Wordle and altered what a guess tells you. Its twist is that the alteration changes from row to row, and is announced in advance, so choosing which word to spend on which row becomes the skill.
This site's Fusele is its own implementation of that puzzle type. The run of rows is drawn from the day, so everyone gets the same sequence; at least one early row is plain and the last row is always plain, so the game can always be finished on full information. No row ever lies. A twisted row tells you less than the truth but never something false, which is the line between this game and Fibble.
How many guesses do you get in Fusele?
Six, one per row, with each row's rule shown before you play it. The twists only weaken the report and never contradict it, so no extra rows are needed to cross-check.
Is Fusele free, and when does the puzzle change?
Fusele is free and needs no sign-up. A new word and a new run of row twists are set every day at midnight UTC. There is no timed mode for this variation, because the run board does not show row labels and a player would be guessing against rules they could not see. It plays on a phone as well as a desktop.