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How to play Extra Time
The rules in five lines, a strategy that works, and an honest account of how the daily football word is chosen.
Extra Time gives you one five-letter football word and six guesses. After each guess the tiles colour: green for a correct letter in the correct position, yellow for a letter that is in the word but in the wrong position, and grey for a letter that is not in the word. Find the word within six rows and your daily streak grows; the puzzle resets at midnight UTC.
Rules
- Type a five-letter word. Any real English five-letter word is accepted as a guess.
- Green — the letter is correct and in the right position.
- Yellow — the letter is in the answer, but not in that position.
- Grey — the letter does not appear in the answer.
- Six guesses. Solve it to keep your streak; fail and the streak resets tomorrow.
Strategy
Open with vowels
Early guesses should find which vowels are present, because every answer contains at least one. A first guess with two or three different vowels narrows the field fast.
Then find consonants
Once you know the vowels, spend a guess on common consonants. Letters like T, S, R, C and N appear across the football vocabulary.
Place before you solve
A yellow tile tells you a letter is right but misplaced. Use the next guess to move known letters into other positions rather than guessing a brand-new word each time.
Use the position lock
When a letter turns green it is fixed. Build later guesses around the greens, and never reuse a grey letter in that slot.
Think football
This is not general English. The answers are football words, footballer surnames and club names, so reach for football vocabulary when you are down to the last row.
The football word list
The answers are a fixed set of 451 five-letter football words and names. They come from three places, and every one is exactly five letters with no accents:
- Football vocabulary — PITCH, DERBY, MATCH, SCORE, CROSS, CROWD, BENCH, SQUAD, COACH, GOALS, BOOTS, SHIRT, BRASS, and more.
- Footballer surnames — real five-letter surnames from our player database, such as BACCA, KROOS, ALVES and BABEL.
- Club names — five-letter club words such as MILAN and BASEL, taken from our club database.
Proper names are capitalised on the board the same as any other word; the puzzle does not tell you which type the answer is, so both are fair ground.
Learn questions
How do you play Extra Time?
Type any real five-letter word and press Enter. The tiles then tell you how close you are: green means right letter, right spot; yellow means the letter is in the answer but in another spot; grey means the letter is not in the answer. You have six guesses to reach the football word.
What is a good first guess?
A word with common letters and a couple of vowels. Because the answers are football words and names, a guess like MATCH, SCORE or GOALS tests letters that recur across the list, and it may even be the answer.
Why was my word rejected?
The board accepts real five-letter English words as guesses, so a valid guess is never turned away. A rejection means the letters do not form a word our list recognises, or the row is not full yet.
How is the daily word chosen?
Deterministically from the date. The answer list is cycled by the UTC day number, so every player gets the same word on the same day and the puzzle changes once at midnight UTC.
Do answers repeat?
Only after every other word in the list has had its turn. The list is a fixed set of football terms and five-letter football names, so the same answer returns on the next cycle, not the next day.