Quina - How to Play

How to play Quina

Back to menu

If you’ve played Mastermind, you already know the rules; Quina and Mastermind are both versions of the same original game.

Quina is also similar to Wordle. Unlike Wordle, however, Quina does not reveal which letters are correct, or in the right position; that's for the player to deduce.

The object of Quina is to guess the secret five-letter code word.

You do this by guessing five-letter words of your own, to see how close they are to the code word.

After each guess, you’ll get a clue showing:

  • How many letters in your guess are also in the code word;
  • How many of those letters are also in the same position in the code word. Like this:
  • GUEST
    21
In the above example, the clue 2/1 means that two of the letters in GUEST are also in the code word, and one of those two is also in the same position in the code word.

As an example: GRAPE would be one possible solution that would fit this clue; the G would be in the right position, and the E would not.

It's impossible to know after just one guess, though, and there would be many other possibilities. That’s why Quina gives you ten guesses!

All words in Quina are five-letter words with no repeated letters.

The code word always follows this rule, and your guesses must do so as well; you can’t guess a made-up or invalid word. (Guesses also can’t contain any characters except the letters A–Z, and are not case-sensitive.)

Valid:

  • ✅ GREAT
  • ✅ SMART

Invalid:

  • ❌ GREET
  • ❌ START
You win the game if you can guess the code word within ten guesses; you lose otherwise.

Example game and strategy

For your first guess, you don’t have anything to go on (unless you start with a hint), so any word will do. It’s generally a good idea to start with words that have common letters in them, though.

You can scroll to the bottom if you’d like to know what the code word is before starting the example.

So let’s say you randomly guess SLATE. The feedback from that guess is:

  • SLATE
    31

That’s a pretty good first result! We know that SLATE has three letters in common with the code word, and that one of them is in the correct position.

TIP: you usually want to avoid changing too many letters at once. In fact, changing exactly one letter at a time between guesses can often be a good way to start.

So there are two good options here:

  1. We could change just one letter—and guess a word like PLATE or SKATE—to see which letters are correct; or
  2. We could rearrange the same letters and try to deduce what’s in the correct position.

Either of these are valid strategies, but let’s say we go with the second and guess STEAL:

  • STEAL
    33
  • SLATE
    31

Guesses are shown newest to oldest.

Now we’re really getting somewhere! Three letters in STEAL are in the code word, and all three of them are in the correct position.

From here, it’s a good idea to try to narrow down which letters don’t belong. This is most easily done by choosing similar words, like STEAK:

  • STEAK
    33
  • STEAL
    33
  • SLATE
    31

That’s a helpful guess, because now we know that the code word does not have either an L or a K (otherwise, the numbers would’ve changed between the two guesses).

You can tap a letter in a guess to cross it out, and long-press (or right-click) to highlight it! At this point, you might tap all the L’s and K’s to remind yourself there aren’t any.

Since we can deduce that three of S, T, E and/or A are in the code word, we might try rearranging those letters to get a sense of which ones are in the correct position—for example, by guessing STAKE:

  • STAKE
    32
  • STEAK
    33
  • STEAL
    33
  • SLATE
    31

From this clue of 3/2, we can safely deduce that the code word most likely starts with ST, and either has an E in the third position, or an A in the fourth position.

How to narrow down further? Again, trying words as similar as possible to what we know is usually a good strategy, so that we can eliminate small pieces at a time. (The more you change at once, the harder it is to know what part of the change mattered.)

Since we’re pretty confident that S and T are correct, we probably want to figure out which of A or E is in the code word (since it doesn’t seem like they both are). We can easiliy do this by refining our previous guess to STOKE:

  • STOKE
    22
  • STAKE
    32
  • STEAK
    33
  • STEAL
    33
  • SLATE
    31

Ah ha! Now we know for sure that the code word has an A in it (since the only thing that changed from the previous guess was swapping out the A for an O, which lowered the number of correct letters in our guess).

That means we also know that A is in the fourth position (because there were no letters out of place when we guessed STEAK and STEAL).

From this feedback, we can conclude with high confidence that the code word probably looks like this:

ST_A_

Remember that you can tap letters to cross them out, and long-press/right-click to highlight them!

Though it wouldn’t really be necessary, if we wanted to be extra certain, we could swap out S and T just to verify.

  • BLOKE
    00
  • STOKE
    22
  • STAKE
    32
  • STEAK
    33
  • STEAL
    33
  • SLATE
    31

While a clue of 0/0 might look like a bad thing, it’s actually extremely helpful! A 0/0 clue lets you eliminate five entire letters. In this case, that means we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the code word starts with ST!

All that’s left now is to start guessing words that fit until we find the solution…

‹ Back to main menu