The game

Find out what is hidden under the four question marks. Enter a guess, either a fourletter word, a number between 1000 and 9999 inclusive, or a random rainbow with four colours. How your guess compares to the secret is shown in the pins that appear on the right of your entry. white represents a correct letter in the wrong place, black is a correct letter in the correct place. You may prefer it the other way around.
The score depends on the number of guesses and the time you needed. Games completed in less than ten turns are listed in the order of your choice under the Last tab.
Novices may be interested in the tutorial. When blackouts occur, you may be tempted to cheat.

Colours, numbers and words

The colours speak for themselves. Numbers do not begin with zero. Words are singular, or infinitive.
The words you enter must be valid words. Categorizing words is not a exact science. For example, 'gilt' is an exception to the above rule; 'info' is still an abbreviation, but 'kilo' is a word in its own right. Some foreign words have found their way into English. Names are not words, but mark that 'Mark' is an old German coin. Umlauts and accent marks are ignored.
We would be delighted to hear of any words you can think of that are not in the list.

Doubles

If you allow doubles, both you and the secret can input the likes of 'look', 'kiss' and '2002'. If you disallow them, they are excluded for both parties. It is not recommended to allow them at present, as the score calculation is somewhat different and is still very much in Bèta.

Look up

To look up a word in a pop-up encyclopedia or reference site, click the ¿ button on the left of it. Select your favourite source from the ¿ Lookup in list. Colours and numbers cannot be looked up.

Count

The average time in which to submit each number/word must remain less than one minute. Fast entries make up for slow ones, but the game times out and you lose the moment when the minutes outnumber the guesses. The clock can be shown counting up or down, or hidden for some added suspense. You may prefer to turn time-outs off, which will render hints priceless.

Sound

The accreditation of pins can be accompanied by 'white' and 'black' auditive effects. The sound files are dynamically loaded into the page, which may affect the effect at first.

Hints

To emulate the human interaction which characterizes the proper game, there will be animations and other distractions, but if you need a hint or two, you may just be given! However, each hint comes with ten penalty seconds.
We would be delighted to hear of any catchy hints you can think of.

Keyboard and mouse

The keyboard can be used to type your guess where the cursor waits. Use \ and / to move between boxes, SPACE and SHIFT+SPACE to erase, and press ENTER when ready. Or point your mouse, select a letter from the list and click the ? button on the right of your experiment. Regrettably the popup list is a bit buggy, especially in the larger sizes.
Some items in the menu are triggered when holding down SHIFT while typing the underlined letter. To avoid confusion and disappointment, verify that CAPS LOCK is turned off.

System requirements

This page works only in Internet Explorer 4+ with javascript enabled, and is optimized for IE5.5 and a screen resolution of 800x600 or greater.

Bugs

Nothing is perfect, but the calculation of the number and colour of pins (in disallow doubles mode) has withstood all every test sofar. Please report any irregularities, stating your browser environment and what you were doing at the time. The browser has been known to crash before.

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