About Five Tries
Five Tries is a word-deduction game in the style that swept the world a few years ago. A five-letter word has been chosen in secret. You have six guesses, and every guess tells you something.
How it works
After each guess, the five tiles change. A green tile is a correct letter in the correct position. A yellow tile, drawn with a dashed border so that it can be told apart without relying on colour, is a letter that belongs in the word but not there. A grey tile is a letter the word does not contain. The keyboard below the board keeps a running record of every letter you have tried.
Your guess must be a real word. The game checks it against a list of several thousand, and tells you if it does not recognise what you typed. The hidden answers, though, are drawn from a much smaller set of everyday words, so you will never be asked to find something obscure.
Getting there in fewer guesses
Open with a word that tests common letters. Something with three vowels and two frequent consonants, such as "raise" or "alone", usually gives you a foothold.
Make the second guess from entirely new letters if the first told you little. Ten different letters across two guesses covers most of the usual suspects.
Respect the yellows. A yellow letter must be used again, and it must move. People lose guesses by leaving a yellow letter where it was.
Remember that letters can repeat. If a word has two of the same letter, each is marked separately.
When several answers fit, pick a guess that splits them, even if it cannot be right itself.
As HTML5 games go, this is a modern classic, and a new word is one tap away.