Gessa

First letter — Five spaces, six tries. Type a word on the on-screen keyboard and each tile turns teal when it sits in the right spot, amber when it belongs elsewhere in the answer, or slate when the word does not contain it. Doubles are scored correctly, and the keyboard keeps track of everything you have learnt. Second letter — Daily word. One answer for everyone on each date, a streak that grows with every day you solve, a seven-day strip on the hub and your daily grid kept until the next one arrives. Third letter — Blitz. Three minutes to solve as many words as you can, with more points for fewer rows: seven minus the rows used, times ten. Your highest score and most words in a run are kept, with a sparkline of recent attempts. Fourth letter — Practice and Hard mode. Practice serves endless puzzles with no clock, drawn from more than 650 hand-picked answers, while around 12,500 words are accepted as entries. Hard mode makes you reuse every clue already revealed, for players who like a stricter challenge. Fifth letter — Word origins and records. A quiz of ten cards drawn from 26 real facts about where English words come from, ten badges that open up in place when tapped, and a Stats tab with games played, solve rate, streaks, a rows-to-solve chart and a 25-row history. Haptics and the slow ambient glow can be switched off, and the game plays offline, with no ads and no account.