trimtram

Guess distribution

Hints

Badges

Records live in this browser until the Grimoire opens.

The urn

Fifteen tiles: the five letters of the word and ten decoys. A decoy never shares a letter with the word, and may appear twice, never thrice.

Drawing

Draw one tile at a time. Your hand is unordered; position only matters when you guess. Tap a tile to strike it as a suspected decoy — a note to yourself, unless you play hard mode.

Guessing

Three guesses, any time, even before drawing. Each is marked tile by tile:

Points

You start with 45. A draw costs 2, a wrong guess 5, and the guess that solves it is free. What’s left is your score. You can’t spend what you don’t have: the urn and the hints close when you can’t cover them, and a wrong guess you can’t cover ends the round. The whole word drawn meter is the raw chance the five real letters are already in your hand; it ignores your guesses on purpose.

Hints

Strike a decoy (5), reveal a consonant (10), reveal a vowel (20), consult the bank (25, once a round). Buy as many as your points allow. Every hint is kept on your record.

The bank

The daily word is hand selected from a published bank of the publication’s own themed words, and changes at the whim of the hand. We call it TrimTram because the urn randomizes how it is packed against you: it decides how many of the ten decoys keep spelling other words from the bank and how many are noise. Endless draws from the bank and from the Cellar, a larger store of ordinary words, so it does not repeat.

Hard mode

Strikes become commitments. Every unstruck tile in your hand must be played, so with more than five you strike down before you guess, and a struck tile can’t be played until you unstrike it, which costs a point. At zero, strikes are final. Confirmed letters must be reused. House rule: the hand waives a tile it has already ruled out.

Editions

The daily puzzle is for everyone: the same word and the same fifteen tiles, though the order they leave the urn is your own. Endless and the Archive are for subscribers. You will not win them all. We have tried. Losing is part of the fun.