Jottly strategy

Your first few words are for gathering letters, not for winning. Play real words packed with different, common letters: the vowels, plus workhorses like R, S, T, N, and L. A good habit is to cover around twenty different letters across your first four moves. Every letter you spend is one the board can tell you about.

Try AROSE, then UNLIT. Between them that's ten different letters, almost all common, and two scores to point you toward the rest.

One rule that quietly matters: don't repeat a letter inside a single word. A repeated letter only counts once, so a word like SPEED only ever tests four distinct letters. Make all five count.

The number tells you how many letters your guess shares with their word. Position never matters, so it's pure letter overlap. Two ends of the scale are worth the most:

• A zero is a gift. It rules out all five of your letters at once. That's the most a single move can tell you, so welcome it instead of groaning.
• A high number early means you're swimming in their letters. Slow down and start isolating rather than committing to whole words.

Auto deduction marks the obvious in-and-out letters on your keyboard as you go, and it never gives the secret away. The deductions that win games are the ones you make on top of it. If you'd rather keep your own notes, turn on Type/Track mode in Settings for manual letter-marking tools.

Once you've ruled some letters out, those dead letters become tools. Build a word around a single unknown and pad the rest with letters you know are out. Now the only thing that can move your score is the letter you're testing.

Say you've already ruled out B, L, N, and D. Playing BLAND tests one thing: whether their word has an A. The four dead letters can't change the number, so a 1 means yes and a 0 means no. That's elimination run on purpose instead of by luck.

When a move shares all five letters without solving, you've found every letter. They're just in the wrong order, and that's the home stretch, not a dead end.

In Jottly you can drag your confirmed letters into any order along the confirmed row. Try the arrangements that actually spell words: lead with common pairings like TH, CH, and ST, keep a vowel near the middle, and you'll usually land it in a move or two.

A good secret word is fair but not free. Pick a real five-letter word with five different letters (Jottly asks for distinct letters anyway). Lean a little off the beaten path: a word like FJORD or NYMPH gives away fewer early matches than HOUSE does, because its letters are rarer.

Keep it a word a friend could actually find, though. The goal is a satisfying chase, not a word nobody can crack.