About Letter Guess
Letter Guess is the old pencil-and-paper guessing game, without the grim drawing. A word is hidden, shown only as a row of empty tiles. You call out letters one at a time. Right letters fill in. Wrong ones cost you.
How it works
The hidden words are familiar nouns of six, seven or eight letters: the kind of thing you might find in a kitchen, a garden or a classroom. You begin with seven blue dots. Each wrong letter empties one. If the word is complete before the last dot goes, you win, and the game tells you how many you had to spare.
Letters you have tried are marked on the keyboard, green for those in the word and black for those that are not, so you cannot waste a guess by repeating one.
Guessing well
Start with vowels, but not all of them. E and A are the most common letters in English, and trying those two first nearly always reveals something. O and I come next. U can usually wait.
Then go for the common consonants: T, N, S, R and L. A handful of these plus two vowels will show you the outline of most words.
Look at the shape before you guess again. A pattern such as _ A _ _ E _ is far more useful than the alphabet. Think of words that fit and test the letter that would confirm your best idea.
Watch for double letters. Words like "balloon", "butter" and "kitten" hide a pair, and a single correct guess fills both.
Do not guess rare letters early. J, Q, X and Z are almost never worth a dot until the pattern demands them.
It is one of the gentlest HTML5 games here, and a good one to play aloud with a child.