How to play the Four Letter Word Game

BJ Homer taught a bunch of us Automatticians how to play the Four Letter Word Game at a meetup. I taught my parents how to play today and I haven’t found a writeup of it that I could refer to, so I thought I’d make a quick post on how to play.

What you need: Two people, each with a piece of paper and a pencil.

Gameplay:

Each person picks a four letter word.

They take turns guessing a four letter word. After each guess, the other person tells them how many letters they guessed are in the word.

When one person thinks they’ve figured out the other person’s word, they need to take a turn to explicitly ask, “Is your word….?”

More details

Figuring out how many letters to tell the guesser that they got right:

You go through each letter in the guessed word and compare it to each letter in your word. If the letter you are comparing appears anywhere, even if you’ve already “used” it, that counts. Getting four letters right does not mean you’ve guessed the word… see SASS vs CATS for example:

It doesn’t matter how many of that letter are in my word; it’s just a “yes/no” question:

Image credits: BJ Homer

You don’t give the other player any info about the order of the letters, or which letters they got right. That is what they need to figure out on their own.

I played this game with my Mom yesterday and found it helpful to write the alphabet along the top of a notepad page, then draw a line down the middle. The left side I write my guesses and scores down, the right side I write my word and the other player’s guesses and scores down.

It is helpful to keep track of all words and scores. To quote BJ, “Your partner will almost certainly lie to you at some point. They probably won’t mean to, but they’ll make a mistake.”

Here are some example sheets from both players in two games:

Have fun!