How to play Cascadle

The short version

Solve five words in a row: three letters, then four, five, six and seven. Every time you solve one, the whole board is recoloured against the next answer. Guesses are unlimited; your score is the number of tiles you spend.

What the colours mean

Guessing CAT when the answer is COAT:
Example — not a real puzzle
C
A
T
  • Green — the letter is in the answer and in that exact position.
  • Yellow — the letter is in the answer but somewhere else.
  • Grey — the letter is not in the answer at all.

Repeated letters follow the usual rule: a letter is only coloured as many times as it actually appears in the answer, and exact matches are counted first.

The cascade

This is the part that makes Cascadle different from a normal word game. When you solve a level, your earlier guesses do not scroll away — they are re-coloured against the new, longer answer. A guess that was all grey against the three-letter word can light up green against the four-letter one.

Suppose you had solved CAT on the third try — the board would look like this:
Example — not a real puzzle
B
A
T
H
A
T
C
A
T
If the four-letter answer were COAT, every row you already played flips to new colours:
Example — not a real puzzle
B
A
T
H
A
T
C
A
T

A and T went from green to yellow — still in the answer, but no longer in those positions. So the right instinct at a new level is to read before you type: you usually start with several letters already placed or narrowed down, and the work is arranging them rather than finding them.

How the chain is built

Each answer keeps at least all but one of the previous answer's letters and adds the rest. For example tea → heat → earth → hearts → shatter: every step drops at most one letter and brings in one or two new ones. That guarantee is what makes the inherited colours worth reading.

Each step keeps almost every letter and adds one or two:
T
E
A
H
E
A
T
E
A
R
T
H
H
E
A
R
T
S
S
H
A
T
T
E
R

Scoring

Your score is tiles, not guesses. Each guess costs as many tiles as the word is long, so a wrong seven-letter guess costs more than a wrong three-letter one. Solving every level first try costs 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 = 25 tiles, a perfect cascade.

Counting tiles rather than guesses keeps the levels fair against each other — a game scored purely on guess count would make the short levels almost free.

Tips

  1. Open with a three-letter word that uses common letters — you are buying information, not trying to win on the first row.
  2. At every new level, look at the recoloured board before typing. The answer often uses letters you have already confirmed.
  3. A grey letter stays grey for the rest of the chain only if it is absent from every remaining answer — and it usually is, since consecutive answers share nearly all their letters.
  4. Long shots are expensive at the seven-letter level. If you are unsure, spend a guess that tests several uncertain letters at once.
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