How quickly can you recognize something from a single clue?
That’s the challenge behind WordPass, a daily guessing game that gives you five chances to identify one answer.
The first clue is intentionally difficult. The clues get progressively easier from there. Your goal is to solve the puzzle before you need all five.
How WordPass Works
Every WordPass puzzle has one answer and five one-word clues.
The clues are arranged from hardest to easiest. Early clues might rely on an obscure fact, scientific term, historical connection or indirect association. Later clues become increasingly recognizable.
If you know the answer, make your guess.
If you don’t, pass and reveal another clue.
Each new word gives you more information — but using another clue also means you missed the opportunity for an earlier solve.
The First Clue Is Supposed to Hurt
WordPass is designed so that clue number one can feel almost unfair.
That’s intentional.
A first-clue solve should feel like an accomplishment. Maybe you happen to know an unusual fact. Maybe the clue hits something directly in your wheelhouse. Or maybe you make an inspired connection that turns out to be right.
By clue three, the picture should be getting clearer.
By clue five, the game is giving you a much stronger push toward the answer.
The fun is seeing exactly where your knowledge intersects with the puzzle.
Anything Is Fair Game
A WordPass answer might be a person, place, invention, natural phenomenon, movie, historical event, scientific concept, object or cultural reference.
That allows the clues to approach answers from very different directions.
A puzzle about a famous person could begin with a year, move through a place or associate, and eventually reach the thing for which that person is best known.
A puzzle about an object might start with its inventor or scientific principle before eventually describing what the thing actually does.
The clues tell a tiny story in reverse: obscure first, obvious last.
Know When to Pass
The name of the game is also part of the strategy.
You can guess — or you can pass.
Throwing out random answers isn’t necessarily helpful. Sometimes the smarter move is accepting that the current clue isn’t enough and seeing what comes next.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that the next clue makes the answer painfully obvious and you immediately realize you should have known it.
Welcome to WordPass.