Number Guess Tips: How to Crack a Five-Digit Code in Six Tries (2026)

1. Gray is the strongest tile, not the weakest

New players read the board backwards. Green feels like the win and yellow feels like progress, so gray feels like a wasted tile. It is the other way round. Green tells you one tile; yellow tells you one digit is somewhere else; but gray removes a digit from the code completely.

That matters because there are only ten digits. Every gray tile is roughly a tenth of the symbol set struck out for good, and because the code may repeat a digit, gray is stronger here than in a word game: when the code holds two 3s and your guess shows a green 3 plus a gray 3, you have just proved the code holds exactly one 3 — not "at least one". Treat gray as the result you are hunting for early on.

2. Spend the first two rows on information, not on being right

In a code game the opening guess is a probe. A row of five different digits tests five of the ten symbols at once, and that is usually most of what is in the code: the expected number of distinct digits in a random five-digit code is about 4.10 (10 × (1 − 0.9⁵)), and about 7 in 10 codes (69.8%) repeat at least one digit, so a single clean probe with five different digits normally touches nearly every distinct digit you have to find. Guesses like 01234 or 12345 are not lazy — they are the highest-information opening available.

The benchmark shows how much this matters. On the same rules, a solver that always plays the most informative guess cracked 94.0% of codes inside six at an average of 4.75 guesses. A solver that instead played the first code still consistent with the feedback — the tempting shortcut — averaged 5.56 guesses and cracked only 58.6%. The difference is almost entirely the first two rows: one player is mapping the code, the other is guessing at it.

3. Test for repeated digits on purpose

The rule that separates this game from a word game is that the code can repeat a digit, and the scoring is the two-pass rule. Take code 11234 and guess 21100:

• Pass one finds the exact hits: the 1 in slot two is green, so it is used up, and the digits the code still has to place are 1, 2, 3 and 4.
• Pass two spends those: the guessed 2 takes the only 2 (yellow), the guessed 1 in slot three takes the second 1 (yellow), and both 0s have nothing left to take (gray).
• Result: yellow / green / yellow / gray / gray.

The practical move is to put the same digit twice in one row when you suspect it repeats. A green plus a yellow proves the code holds at least two copies; a green plus a gray proves it holds exactly one. That single probe is often worth more than a whole row of fresh digits, because it converts a vague "this digit is in there" into a count.

4. Turn greens into slots and yellows into eliminations

A green tile pins a slot and you never have to test it again — but it does not tell you the digit appears only once. A green 5 with repeats still allowed means the code may hold a second 5 elsewhere, so keep the digit in mind instead of retiring it.

A yellow tile is a subtraction, not an answer. It says: this digit is in the code, but not in this slot. Two yellows on the same digit in different slots are a gift — they eliminate two positions at once. The habit worth building is to write the surviving slots for each yellow digit next to the board as you go, and to spend a row once the field for one digit is down to two candidates.

5. The endgame: stop probing and start counting

With one or two rows left, stop exploring and enumerate. List every code that is still consistent with all the feedback you have seen; on a well-probed board that list is usually short — often one, two or three lines. If one code survives, play it. If two or three survive, pick the guess that separates them, which is normally the guess that reveals the most positions of the digits you are still unsure about.

Two endgame traps. First, a gray from an early row is still true: do not re-test a digit you already eliminated. Second, the count matters: if the code repeats a digit and you have only pinned one copy, a guess that spends both slots on that digit tells you whether a second copy exists at all.

6. Six guesses is a real budget

Five digits from ten symbols is 100,000 codes — about 16.6 bits of uncertainty, against six guesses of at most 243 feedback patterns each. That is enough room to play properly and not enough room to guess lazily, and the solver numbers above show both sides: good play almost always lands inside six, and the shortcut does not.

So do not read a loss as a mistake. Even an entropy-greedy solver misses about 6% of codes inside six, and a human will miss more. When a round ends without a solution the code is revealed, and the New code button at the bottom of the board deals a fresh random code so you can go again immediately — the daily code comes back when you open the page again without replaying.

FAQ

How do you play Number Guess?

Type five digits into the current row with the on-screen keypad or a physical keyboard and press Enter. Each digit is scored green (right digit, right slot), yellow (the digit is in the code but in another slot) or gray (every copy of that digit is already accounted for). Crack the code within six rows to win; run out of rows and the code is revealed.

What do the green, yellow and gray tiles mean?

Green is an exact hit and uses that digit up. Yellow means the digit is somewhere else in the code. Gray means the digit is not available any more — with repeats allowed, a gray tile is a complete elimination, which makes it the most useful result on the board.

Can the code repeat a digit?

Yes. Each of the five positions is an independent digit from 0 to 9, repeats included, so 11111 and 90210 are both valid codes. The scoring handles it with the two-pass rule, and you can deliberately guess the same digit twice in a row to find out whether the code repeats it.

What is the best first guess in Number Guess?

Five different digits, such as 01234 or 12345. A row of five different digits probes half the symbol set in one guess, and a random five-digit code only contains about 4.10 distinct digits on average, so the opening probe usually touches nearly every distinct digit in the code. The first row is for dividing the space, not for trying to be right.

How many possible codes are there?

100,000: every code from 00000 to 99999, because each of the five positions can be any of the ten digits and digits may repeat. About 30.2% of codes use five different digits; the other 69.8% repeat at least one.

Is everyone playing the same code?

Yes — the opening code is the daily code, derived from the calendar date, so every player gets the same one until local midnight. A ?code=12345 link pins a specific code for practice or for sharing, and the New-code button deals a uniformly random code from 00000 to 99999.

Are six guesses enough?

For good play, yes: an entropy-greedy solver cracked 94.0% of 200 sampled codes inside six at an average of 4.75 guesses. For lazy play, no: the same rules with a naive guess-the-first-consistent-code strategy solved only 58.6% of 3,000, averaging 5.56. Six rows is the budget that makes the two styles measurably different, which is the point.

Does it work on a phone, and does it save my progress?

Yes to the phone: at a 390px viewport all 30 tiles and the whole keypad stay on screen with no sideways scrolling, and a tap runs the same code path as a mouse click. The round is not saved between visits — reopening the page gives you that day's code again from scratch, and New code gives you a random one.

Where can I play it?

Right on this site's number-guess page. The engine is Playnesta-original and the base tile styling and two-pass scoring pattern come from the MIT-licensed wordle-clone by WebDevSimplified and contributors (commit b12c2df); no bitmap, audio or font asset ships with the page and nothing is fetched at runtime, and the license and attribution are listed under the game.