Quordle today – tips and answers for Wednesday 20 September (game no. 604)

• The number of different vowels in Quordle today is 4*.

• The total number of vowels in today’s Quordle answers is 7.

• The number of Quordle answers containing a repeated letter today is 1.

• The total number of different letters used in Quordle today is 13.

• NO. None of the answers Q, Z, X or J appear in today’s Quordle answers.

• The number of today’s Quordle answer starting with the same letter is 2.

• T

• St

• B

• St

While Wordle challenges you to guess a new five-letter word every day, Quordle presents you with four puzzles to solve. And instead of completing them one after the other, you do it simultaneously. You have nine choices, instead of Wordle’s six, but otherwise the rules are very similar.

You can play online via Quordle website and you can also access it via the file Merriam-Webster siteafter the dictionary bought Quordle last year.

As with Wordle, the answers are the same for every player every day, meaning you’re competing against the rest of the world. And as with Wordle, the puzzle resets at midnight, so every day you have a new challenge.

The website also includes a practice mode, which I highly recommend using before trying the actual game! – and there are daily stats including streak count. You also get Quordle Achievements: specific badges for winning a game in a certain number of rounds, playing the game many times, or guessing particularly difficult words.

Oh, and it’s hard. Really difficult.

1. The letters that are in the answer and in the right place turn green.

2. Letters present in the answer but in the wrong place turn yellow.

3. The letters that are not present in the answer become grey…

4. …BUT the word you guess appears in all quadrants of the puzzle at the same time, so an A might turn green in one square, yellow in another, and gray in the last two.

5. The answers are never plural.

6. Letters may appear more than once. So if your guess includes two letters of the same letter, they could both become yellow, both green, or one could be yellow and the other green.

7. Each guess must be a valid word in the Quordle dictionary. You can’t guess ABCDE, for example.

8. You don’t need to include the correct letters on subsequent attempts, and there is no equivalent of Wordle’s Hard mode.

9. You have nine chances to find Quordle answers.

10. You must complete your daily Quordle before midnight in your time zone.

Quordle needs to be approached in a different way than Wordle. With four puzzles to solve in nine tries, you can’t blindly throw letters and expect to win – you’ll have a much better chance if you think strategically.

This is obviously the case in Wordle too, but it’s even more important in Quordle.

There are two key things to remember.

1. Use different starting words

First, you won’t just want a single initial word, but almost certainly two or three initial words.

The first of these should probably be one of the best starting words in Wordle, because the same things that make them work well will apply here too. But next, you should select another or perhaps two words that use many more of the more common consonants and include the remaining vowels.

For example, I currently use STARE > DOILY > PUNCH. Collectively, these three words use 15 of the 26 letters of the alphabet including all five vowels, Y, and nine of the most common consonants (S, T, R, D, L, P, N, C, and H). There are many other options – you might want to put an M, B, F or G in place of the H, perhaps – but something like this should be fine.

Hopefully this will give you a good clue as to what one or sometimes two answers might be. If not, good luck!

2. Narrow things down

Secondly, if you are faced with a word whose answer could easily be one of several options, for example -ATCH, where it could be MATCH, BATCH, LATCH, CATCH, WATCH, HATCH or PATCH, we recommend that you guess a word that could narrow the options.

In Wordle, you can instead try several in succession and hope that one is right, assuming you have enough guesses left. It’s risky, but sometimes it works. Plus, it’s the only option in Hard mode. But in Quordle, this will almost certainly result in failure: you simply don’t have enough assumptions.

In the above scenario, CLAMP would be a great guess, as it could point the way to four of the seven words at once.