Lexicon strategies: thinking without colors
Lexicon strips away position feedback. Here's how to compensate — and why it makes the game more interesting.
Lexicon looks like a familiar five-letter guessing game, but the feedback is stripped down: you get three numbers — correct, present, absent — with no indication of which letters they belong to. It sounds harder. In practice, it's a different game.
Start wide
Because you get no positional information, your opening guesses should maximize letter coverage. Words with common vowels and distinct consonants ("CRANE", "ADIEU", "SLATE") give you the most information per guess.
Track what you know
Keep a mental (or written) list of letters ruled in and ruled out. Two "present" letters across your first two guesses can narrow the answer set dramatically.
Embrace the calculation
The joy of Lexicon is the small deductive puzzle inside every board. Slow down, count carefully, and enjoy the rare feeling of solving something by reasoning rather than by pattern matching.