Anagram Puzzle

Start at the end of the word

Searching by opening letters is the natural instinct at an anagram puzzle and it is the wrong end to work from. Of the 757 words this board draws on, 176 finish with an E, which is close to one in four; 132 finish with a T, 109 with an R and 70 with a Y. The commonest two-letter ending is -ER, on 80 words, well clear of -LE on 52, and then -ON, -ET and -NT. Six letters have seven hundred and twenty arrangements where five had a hundred and twenty, so reading the tray and seeing the word stopped being an option at this length. Park a plausible two-letter tail in the final slots first and what is left is a four-letter problem with twenty-four arrangements, which is small enough to solve by looking at it.

Openings are more spread out, which is exactly why they help less. RE leads on 42 words, then DE on 25 and ST on 21, and after that a flat tail nobody can bet on – BE, PA and SE on 16 each, CA on 15, IN on 14, and CO, PR and SU on 13. The commonest opening covers little more than half as many words as the commonest ending. A tail is the stronger bet here, with one caveat attached to it: Backspace always lifts the rightmost letter on the board, so a tail you have parked is the first thing it removes. Click the individual letter you want to move instead, or clear the row and start the word again.

Count the vowels before you move a tile

483 of the 757 words carry exactly two vowels and 214 carry three. Only 53 carry exactly one, and seven carry four. Two vowels is still the ordinary shape at this length, but three has stopped being the exception it was: one word in eleven at five letters, better than one in four here. The tray worth noticing now is the one holding a single vowel, on fewer than one word in fourteen, and it is worth noticing because it throws away nine tenths of the list before you have touched anything.

One block is worth memorising outright. Seven words in this board’s range contain a Q, and every one of them puts a U immediately after it. A Q in your tray is therefore not a letter to place but a two-letter unit, and on a six-letter word treating it that way leaves four letters to arrange rather than six – twenty-four orders instead of seven hundred and twenty.

The hint fills in from the back, and that is not cosmetic

Take a hint on an empty board and the letter lands near the end of the word rather than at the start. The reason is what people do next: they take the hint and then type the whole word out, hint letter included. Reveal at the front instead, and a board reading L followed by five gaps receives L, I, S, T, E, N and spells LLISTE, with the final keystroke having nowhere left to go, and the game then tells somebody who typed the right word that it is not one. Revealed from the back, the spare keystroke is the one that finds its slot already filled and correct, so the word comes out intact. It is also the fairer letter to sell you for a point, because words are searched by their openings and a tail gives less away.

A hint never finishes the word for you

It refuses to fill the last open slot, and last open is counted on the board rather than on the hints it has handed out. Type five letters of a six-letter word yourself and the button reports that there is nothing left to reveal, because filling the sixth would be giving you a finished word rather than helping you find one. Two hints per word is the ceiling, and the button goes flat once you have spent them or once the round is solved.

On a puzzle with more than one answer the hint has to pick a side, and it picks yours. At six letters and up this list holds sixteen sets of letters that spell more than one word, and every one of them is a pair rather than the three-way tangle a five-letter board runs into: LISTEN and SILENT, CREDIT and DIRECT, DANGER and GARDEN, MASTER and STREAM. Spell L, I and the hint carries on towards LISTEN and hands you the N at the end; spell S, I and the same board hands you SILENT’s T instead. It also never contradicts a letter it gave you earlier, so a locked L in the first slot rules SILENT out for the rest of that round. A hint that argued with itself would be worse than no hint at all, and it is the failure people mean when they say a puzzle game cheats.

What a hint costs, and when to spend one

A hint costs a point off the word, and the scoring is set out in full elsewhere. A six-letter word solved cold is six points, one hint makes it five and two make it four. What matters here is the comparison you are actually making when you reach for the second one, because most people make the wrong one. It is not four points against six. The six went the moment you took the first hint and it is not coming back, so the second hint is four points against what a skip pays, which is nothing at all. That makes it a poor trade only on a word you would have found in another thirty seconds, and the honest test of that is whether you can already name one letter you are confident of.