Why the same letter can be gold and gray in Grid

A gray copy does not always rule out the letter

If you guess a letter twice and one copy turns gold while the other turns gray, the answer contains exactly one copy of that letter. Keep the gold clue. The gray tile tells you that you guessed one copy too many.

In Scramdle Grid Classic, each tile describes one occurrence of a letter. Green means that copy is correctly placed. Gold means it belongs elsewhere. Gray means no unmatched copy remains for that tile. Read all occurrences of a repeated letter together before crossing it off.

The three rows below are made-up teaching examples, with the answers revealed so you can check the clues. They are not today’s puzzles.

One gold L and one gray L: exactly one L

Suppose the answer is APPLE and you guess ALLEY. The A is green. The first L, in position 2, is gold because APPLE has an L elsewhere. The second L, in position 3, is gray because that one L has already been accounted for. The E is gold and the Y is gray.

Your next candidate needs exactly one L. It cannot go in position 2 or 3: neither of those guessed positions matched. Keep A at the start, move E away from position 4, and leave Y out. These clues narrow the possibilities without revealing every position.

Greens are matched before golds

Now suppose the answer is THOSE and your guess is GEESE. The final E is green. The other two Es are gray, even though they appear earlier in the guess. The S is green and the G is gray.

Scramdle first matches every letter that is already in the right position. It then checks the remaining guess tiles from left to right, awarding gold only when an unused copy exists in the answer. That order prevents an earlier misplaced E from taking the match that belongs to the correctly placed final E.

This row tells you to keep S in position 4 and exactly one E in position 5. The gray Es are a count limit, not a reason to remove the green E.

Two colored copies prove at least two

Return to the example answer APPLE, this time with the guess PAPER. The P in position 3 is green; the P in position 1 is gold. Each matches a different P in the answer. A and E are gold, while R is gray.

From this row alone, you know the answer has at least two Ps. You do not yet have a gray P to prove there cannot be a third. APPLE happens to contain two, but a solver who cannot see the answer should keep the distinction between “at least” and “exactly.”

Turn a row into a letter count

For any one letter, count its green and gold tiles in the same row. That is the minimum number of copies the answer contains. If the row also has a gray copy of that letter, the colored count is the exact total.

Do not add counts from different guesses together. A gold L in one row and a gold L in a later row might be describing the very same L. Combine the position clues and keep the strongest count information you have learned.

Use the clues on your next guess

Before submitting another word, check both questions: how many copies can this letter have, and where can they go? Keep greens fixed and move golds to other positions. A gray extra copy still rules out that position for the letter, even when another copy is green or gold.

Scramdle’s hard mode requires the green positions and the minimum number of copies revealed by green and gold tiles. It does not enforce every deduction you can make about gray copies, so a permitted guess is not necessarily a possible answer. Reading the counts yourself still matters.

The same feedback rules apply in Grid Advanced and Grid Expert. See the Scramdle rules for the daily limits and hard-mode behavior. For a formal description of green-first letter matching, see Lokshtanov and Subercaseaux’s Wordle paper (PDF). Scramdle is independent of Wordle and The New York Times.