Word Puzzle

Zol's Cipher Guess the hidden word.

Zol's Cipher is a word-guessing game you play in your browser — guess the hidden word, and every guess paints each letter green, yellow or grey to steer the next one.

The rules

You're hunting one hidden word, with a little more room than letters:

  • The daily word is five letters, and you get one more guess than the word is long.
  • Type any real word and submit it. Each tile tells you how close you are: green means the right letter in the right spot, yellow means the right letter in the wrong spot, and grey means it isn't in the word at all.
  • Use those clues to close in, guess by guess, until the word turns all green.
  • The tiles are shaped as well as coloured — locked, loose or crossed out — so the feedback reads clearly even if colour isn't your thing.

Four difficulties, from forgiving to ruthless

  • Easy — a safety net: run out of guesses and the game hands you a correct letter and lets you keep going, so you always finish.
  • Medium — the standard run. Out of guesses is a loss.
  • Hard — hard mode is on: once a clue is confirmed, every later guess has to keep using it.
  • Zolified — hard mode where breaking a confirmed clue ends the game on the spot, and a 30-second countdown starts revealing letters — at a rising cost — if you stall.

Green is the goal. Yellow is the puzzle. Grey is the process of elimination.

Three ways to play

The Daily is one shared five-letter word for everyone. Free Play lets you pick the word length — five, six, seven or eight letters — and the difficulty, as many rounds as you like. And Versus is a two-player duel: you pick a word for your friend to guess and they pick one for you, then you each set to cracking the other's — the better solve wins.

Play it

Play Zol's Cipher in your browser — nothing to download. Creating an account is free, and new players get a 30-day preview with full access to every game in the catalogue. After the preview, a rotating set of games is free to play each day.

If you like a word to chase, try Zol's Codebreaker, where you crack a whole phrase behind a scrambled alphabet, Zol's Echo, the same guessing game with only the counts revealed, or Zol's Links, where sixteen words hide four secret groups.