BLUFF: Word Games

Most word games hand you a puzzle and ask you to solve it. BLUFF deals you a table and asks a harder question: is this one worth playing at all?

Six seats. Six hands. The deal rotates, so everyone sets the word exactly once.

On your hand you are dealt five candidate words with the crack rate printed on each — how often that word gets solved in three guesses, given an ordinary clue. Pick one, give the table exactly one clue about it, and set the difficulty. Everyone else looks at that clue and makes a single decision: take it on, or fold and keep their stars.

Call, and you get four guesses — but only the first three beat the setter. Crack it and you take the setter’s stars. Miss and they take yours. Fold and it costs you nothing, and a laydown you were right to make still scores.

That one decision is the whole game. A generous clue draws callers and caps what you are allowed to claim. A mean clue scares the table off and wins you almost nothing. The stars are in a word that looks beatable and is not.

WHAT IS IN IT

Four, five and six-letter hands, mixed in the same match. A short word hides less and gives a guess less to grip, which is what makes four letters the hardest thing at the table A daily table where every player in the world is dealt the identical six hands until midnight A global board that ranks decisions rather than luck — what you cracked, what you held, and what you were right to refuse — with every run re-scored on our side from the decisions that produced it A rating and a public win-loss record that follow you, and a ladder that seats you against players your own size Friends by exact handle, playing your deals, with a challenge that lands on their phone Power-ups earned at the table and never sold: a free letter, a gift to a rival, a peek at their board, a scrambled keyboard, a seat change, a rare word swap Speed tables at 90 seconds a hand, the clock invisible until the last 30 seconds Private tables by code or QR, so a table of six can be your six 3,576 answers, each shown at the end of the hand with how to say it and what it means Every tile carries a shape as well as a colour, so nothing here depends on colour vision