Welcome to Tares
Tares is not a Wordle game. It is a Wordle board analyzer: you enter the board you already have, and Tares shows strong choices for your next guess.
You can follow the top suggestion, compare the top few words, or use the recommendations to understand why some guesses are more useful than others. Think of it as a training tool for Wordle strategy.
The actual Wordle game can be played on the New York Times website.
How Does It Work?
Tares starts by finding every word in the current language pack that still matches your board. Then it asks a practical question: if you played a particular guess next, how well would the possible color patterns separate those remaining answers?
A strong guess tends to split the answer list into smaller groups. A perfect separating guess would give a different color pattern for every remaining answer, so after playing it you would know exactly which answer is correct.
The underlying calculation uses maximum entropy. In plain terms, Tares rewards guesses that are expected to remove the most uncertainty.
What Do The Percentages Mean?
The recommendation scores are shown on a 0-100 scale.
Info estimates how much uncertainty a guess is expected to remove. Higher Info means the guess divides the remaining answers into smaller, more useful groups.
Common is a normalized word-commonness score. It comes from the current language pack's frequency data when available, with a simple letter-frequency fallback for words outside that data. Common is not the probability that the word is the answer; it is a guide to how familiar or natural the word is likely to be.
Practical combines the two: 72% Info and 28% Common. Practical mode still values information most, but it nudges the list toward words that are more recognizable and playable.
Normal, Hard, Optimal, And Practical
There are two separate choices in Tares.
Normal and Hard decide which guesses are allowed. Normal mode allows any word in the language pack. Hard mode follows Wordle's hard-mode idea: known green letters must stay fixed, and known yellow letters must be reused in different positions.
Optimal and Practical decide how allowed guesses are ranked. Optimal ranks by Info only. Practical blends Info with Common, so the top suggestions tend to feel more natural while still revealing useful information.
This distinction matters. Normal mode can recommend a probe word that cannot be the answer. Hard mode often cannot, because it must obey the clues already on the board.
Example
Suppose your first guess is TARES and the board looks like this:
In the current English pack, that board leaves five possible answers: TEREK, THREE, THREW, TIRED, and TYRED.
In Normal + Optimal mode, Tares may recommend a probe such as AIYEE. That word cannot be the answer, but it produces a different tile pattern for each of the five remaining answers. It is valuable because it can identify the answer on the next turn.
In Hard + Optimal mode, the recommendation changes. Hard mode must keep the green T, R, and E in place, so off-pattern probes such as AIYEE are not legal. For this board, THREE becomes the strongest Hard-mode choice: it is a possible answer, it obeys the board, and it splits the five candidates better than the other legal options.
The lesson is that the "best" word depends on both the board and the rules you are using. Normal mode can spend a guess to gather information. Hard mode is more constrained, so its best move can be different.
Is It Always Correct To Choose The Top Word?
No. The top word is mathematically strong for the current settings, but Wordle is still a human game. The accepted-guess dictionary contains many uncommon words, and Normal mode may intentionally recommend a probe that cannot be the answer.
The best habit is to review the top choices and choose the word that matches how you want to play. If you care most about narrowing the puzzle, use Optimal. If you want suggestions that lean toward familiar words, use Practical.
If you play Wordle in Hard Mode, turn on the Hard mode switch in Tares. Otherwise, Tares may suggest legal Wordle guesses that are useful for gathering information but would not be allowed in a hard-mode game.
Is This Cheating?
Strictly speaking, yes, if you use it during a live Wordle puzzle. But Tares is also useful as a training tool: it shows why certain guesses are powerful and helps you build better intuition.
What Does The Name Mean?
The app is named Tares because TARES is a very strong first guess for English Wordle under this app's scoring model. The word "tares" also means weeds that resemble wheat while growing