How to play Squardle

What is a Squardle?

Squardle is a word puzzle in which you fill a five-by-five grid of six crossing five-letter words, three across and three down, by guessing a word into one line at a time, with every square you cover reporting on both the across word and the down word that run through it.

Also known as: Crossgrid, crossword Wordle, grid word game.

How do you solve a Squardle?

1. 01

   Learn the six colours

   Green means the letter belongs in that exact square. Yellow means it belongs elsewhere in the across word through that square, red elsewhere in the down word, and orange in both at once. Pale grey means the letter is somewhere on the grid but in neither word through that square; dark grey means it is nowhere on the board. The colours name grid directions, not the direction you typed.

2. 02

   Open on the crossings

   Every line has three crossing squares, at its first, third and fifth positions, and a crossing reports on two words. Put common letters such as S, E, A, R and T on those positions in your first guesses, so that five squares of feedback tell you about four words at once: the line you played and the three it crosses.

3. 03

   Read the arrows as counts

   Beside a yellow, red or orange square the board draws arrows: the number of arrows in a direction is how many of that letter the word in that direction holds, capped by how many you played. A guess along a row can pay several arrows for its row but only ever one per column it crosses, so a double letter is best tested along the line it lives in.

4. 04

   Use pale grey to place letters elsewhere

   A pale grey letter is on the board but not in either word through that square, which means it belongs in one of the words that do not pass through it. With six words and a crossing structure, that often narrows a letter to a single line. Keep a note of pale greys by letter; they are the clue new players throw away.

5. 05

   Finish words for the bonus

   Each finished word adds two guesses, so completing a word you are nearly sure of is usually worth more than probing an open one. Prefer finishing a line whose last squares are crossings, because those greens also finish squares of the lines they meet, and a word can complete without ever being guessed directly.

Common Squardle mistakes

• Guessing into a finished word. A completed line is closed and the guess is refused, since it could tell you nothing.
• Reading yellow as an ordinary yellow. Here it refers only to the across word through that square; a letter that belongs to the down word is red, and one that belongs to both is orange.
• Ignoring pale grey. It is a positive clue that the letter is on the board in a word not passing through that square, which is very different from the dark grey of a letter that is nowhere.

Where does Squardle come from?

Squardle appeared in 2022 as one of the games that took the coloured-tile scoring popularised by Josh Wardle's Wordle and applied it to a different shape. Instead of one word and one row, it set six words in a crossword-like grid, so that a guess played along one line also answers questions about the lines it crosses.

This site's Squardle is its own implementation of that puzzle type. The grid is five by five with four empty squares, so twenty-one squares hold six words that share nine crossings. You begin with twelve guesses, every word you finish adds two more, and a word can finish on its own once the lines crossing it have filled every square.