Tips & strategies

To keep the game simple and accessible to everyone, I source the solution words from a shortlist of 2,309 common words. Compare this to the full list of 14,869 valid 5-letter words in the dictionary!

A row will turn green every time it happens to spell out a word, even an obscure one. This is deliberately done so that you know that the Quintumble solution is unique, even when obscure words are possible. But just because a word is possible, it doesn't mean it will get you to the solution. Remember, the objective is to make 5 words in total. If you haven't heard of the word before (yet the tiles turned green), chances are this word won't feature in the solution.

Similarly, offensive or crude words will light up green, because they are all legitimate words in the English dictionary. But you can be sure that they will never feature in the solution.

Uncommon letters are generally easier to slot into their correct positions, because there are fewer words that can be made with them. For example, there are much fewer words with a J, Q, X or Z than, say, an E, A, R, or O.

Once you figure out the word containing the uncommon letter, it becomes a lot easier to figure out the other words, because there will be fewer remaining letters to deal with.

Letters can only be moved within their respective column. This means that their position within the 5-letter word is fixed.

What this implies is that apart from a letter's overall rarity, its positional rarity also matters. For instance, E is the most common letter overall, featuring 1,230 times in the list of 2,309 common words. However, E at the start of the word is much rarer, featuring in only 72 words. Similarly, A is another very common letter overall (975 words), but is relatively rare at the end of the word (only 63 words).

This holds true even for rarer letters. W as the first letter of the word is a lot more common (82 instances) than as the last letter (just 17 instances).

Some letter pairs are quite common in English words - such as ST, SH, CR, BR at the start of the word; and LY, SE, TY, TE at the end of the word. So, when you see these letters in adjacent columns, look out for possibilities to pair them together.

But when employing this strategy, it's best to start out with the uncommon letters first. For example, if B appears in the first column, and C, V, A, L, T are in the second column, you can be sure that the letter after B will be A or L (because English words don't begin with BC, BV or BT). Now if another letter in the first column is W, then you know that the A from the second column must be paired with the W (because WC, WV, WL and WT are not possible). Which means that the B cannot be paired with the A afterall (as it belongs with the W) so the only remaining possibility is for the B to be paired with the L.

In a similar vein, if there is a Q in your puzzle, then you can be assured that a U in the right-adjacent column belongs to the Q, even if it fits perfectly for another word!

In any Quintumble puzzle, there will be many words that can be made using the given letters. Yet there is only one unique set of 5 words that can be made together. This means that each and every word that is not part of this set of 5 is a ‘false positive’.

Do not feel obligated to stick to your words (pun unintended) if you are stuck and unable to make the rest of the words. Of course, you cannot be entirely sure which of your current word(s) are correct and which ones are the ‘false positives’, which is what makes Quintumble fun and challenging.

Although it takes some amount of trial-and-error to figure it out, there are certain pointers that help in deciding where to begin. It is less likely that a word containing a rare letter will be a ‘false positive’ because, as explained above, there are fewer possible words with rarer letters. So, a good strategy would be to first undo the word(s) with the more common set of letters.

As a general rule, it's better to use the REVEAL LETTER option only after you have already established multiple possibilities for a particular tile. Otherwise, you may end up with the oh-so frustrating outcome of revealing a tile that is already holding its correct letter. So, before revealing the correct letter for a tile, try to establish that it's possible to make two or more words by swapping the letters in this tile.

Remember that the letters in the first column are fixed. So all the other tiles are revealed in relation to the fixed tile in the first column. Use this as a guide in deciding which tiles to reveal.