Five Letters

Five Letters is a word game set on a printer's desk. The board is a warm sheet of paper under a desk lamp, and every letter you type is a little block of wooden type that drops into place with a clack. Press Enter and the row stamps down with a thud of ink, then each block turns over in turn: green means the letter is in the word and in the right place, amber means it is in the word somewhere else, and grey means it is not in the word at all. Solve it and the page takes a shower of ink splats and paper scraps.

There is one daily word, the same for everyone on the date, and the game keeps your run of days, how many puzzles you have solved and how many tries each one took, drawn as a little card of bars. When you want more than one word a day, Endless deals a new word as fast as you can solve them. Hard mode holds you to every hint you have uncovered: once a block turns green that letter has to stay where it is, and an amber letter has to appear somewhere in every guess that follows.

The word list was written for this game: a couple of thousand everyday words as answers, and nine thousand more accepted as guesses, so nothing obscure is ever the answer but the words you actually try are recognised. Type on a keyboard or tap the on-screen blocks; the board fills the top of a phone screen with the keys under your thumb, and spreads out with the record card beside it on a wider screen. Your streak and statistics are kept in your browser and nowhere else.