Color Masked Wordle is a Wordle challenge where the letter tiles give no feedback. After each guess you see only three numbers: how many letters are green (right spot), yellow (wrong spot) and red (not in the word). Colour Swap Wordle keeps normal feedback but reassigns the three colours, so you decode them first.
Both formats come from creator Kenny Haller’s daily “Game Gauntlet” videos, not from the New York Times. Colour Swap aired on 24 September 2026 and Color Masked on 27 September 2026, and the Colour Swap short passed 1 million YouTube views in under a week. You can’t switch either mode on in the official game, but you can play both, and the logic below solves them.
Spoiler note:the worked examples use the answers to Wordle #1923 (24 Sep 2026) and #1926 (27 Sep 2026). Neither is today’s puzzle.
What is Color Masked Wordle?
Color Masked Wordle takes away the one thing normal Wordle gives you: which letter earned which colour. You still guess a five-letter word, but the result is a scoreboard of three counts next to the row, not a row of coloured tiles.
| Count | Colour | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| First | Green | Letters in the answer and in the right position |
| Second | Yellow | Letters in the answer but in the wrong position |
| Third | Red | Letters not in the answer |
The three numbers always add up to five. Any colours you see on the letters themselves are your own notes. In the video, Kenny recolours tiles by hand as he rules letters in or out, and the game never colours them for you.
Is Color Masked Wordle the same as Word500?
Yes. It is the scoring system of Word500(word500.com), a Mastermind-style daily game, applied to that day’s Wordle answer. The video title even says “Color Masked Daily Wordle Word 500.” Word500 uses green, yellow and red counts, lets you tap a letter to cycle your own red, yellow and green marks, and gives 8 attempts on its standard level. The board in the Wordle video shows six rows, like regular Wordle.
The one rule that doesn’t carry over is repeated letters. Word500’s standard level promises no repeated letters. The Wordle answer used in the video, SLOOP, has two O’s.
What is Colour Swap Wordle?
Colour Swap Wordle gives you honest feedback in the wrong colours. Each guess is scored exactly like normal Wordle, but green, yellow and gray have been reassigned to different meanings, so a “green” tile might mean the letter isn’t in the word at all.
In the 24 September 2026 video, the swap was a clean three-way rotation:
| What the tile showed | What it actually meant |
|---|---|
| Green | Not in the word (normally gray) |
| Gray | In the word, wrong spot (normally yellow) |
| Yellow | Right letter, right spot (normally green) |
The mapping stayed the same for the whole game, and that is what makes it solvable. The challenge is that nobody tells you the mapping, so your first job is to crack the colour code, and your second is to crack the word.
“Colour swap” can also mean high-contrast mode
Some people searching “colour swap Wordle” really mean the palette change in the official game. The settings menu has a High Contrast Mode, built for colour-blind players, that turns green tiles orange and yellow tiles blue. The meanings don’t change, only the colours do. If your tiles went orange and blue without warning, that’s this setting, not a challenge. Our guide to red and orange Wordle squares shows how to switch it off, and Wordle colours meaning has the full colour reference.
How is each mode different from normal Wordle?
Normal Wordle tells you which letter and whatstatus. Colour Swap hides the “what” behind a code. Color Masked hides the “which” behind a count.
| Normal Wordle | Colour Swap | Color Masked | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feedback per letter? | Yes | Yes, in scrambled colours | No, per guess only |
| You know which letter is right? | Yes | Once you decode the colours | No, you have to deduce it |
| Colour meanings | Green / yellow / gray | Unknown; fixed rotation in the 24 Sep video | Green / yellow / red counts |
| Guesses | 6 | 6 | 6 in the video (8 on Word500) |
| Repeated letters possible? | Yes | Yes | Yes with a Wordle answer (SLOOP) |
| Main skill | Letter elimination | Decoding, then elimination | Logic across rows |
| Hardest part | Double letters | The first two guesses | Every row with mixed counts |
How to solve Colour Swap Wordle
Crack the colour code before you chase the word. A guess that teaches you the mapping is worth more than a guess that might be the answer.
- Open with common letters you’d happily see ruled out. A normal opener like STARE or CRANEis fine. On most guesses the majority of letters are not in the answer, so the colour that shows up most often is probably “not in the word.”
- Look for a one-colour row.If all five tiles match, that colour almost certainly means “absent.” It can only mean “correct” if you just guessed the answer.
- Test the other two colours by position.Put a letter you’ve already seen in a new slot. If the same letter shows the same colour in two different positions, that colour can’t mean “right spot.”
- Write the mapping down.Once you’ve pinned one colour, the other two follow from a single position test.
- Solve normally. From here it’s regular Wordle. Use the solver with the real colours you decoded, not the ones on screen.
Worked example: MESSY, 24 September 2026
The board as it appeared in the video, in its swapped colours.
- THINK: all five tiles green. A one-colour row on guess one means green = “not in the word.” T, H, I, N and K are out.
- PROVE: P, R, O and V green (out), E gray. So E is in the word, and gray is one of the two “in the word” colours.
- QUELL: Q, U and both L’s green (out), E gray again, now in slot 3. E can’t be correct in both slot 5 and slot 3, so gray means “wrong spot.” That leaves yellow as “right spot.”
- DECAY: D, C and A green (out). E yellow in slot 2 and Y yellow in slot 5. Both are locked.
- MESSY: all yellow. Solved in five guesses.
The whole game turned on guess 3. Replaying E in a new position proved what gray meant.
How to solve Color Masked Wordle
Every guess in Color Masked Wordle is an equation, not a map. You solve it by comparing rows that share letters, and by using zeros aggressively.
- Zeros are your best friend.A row scoring 0 green and 0 yellow removes all five letters at once. That’s the one result that tells you exactly which letters are out.
- A zero-yellow row means every present letter is already in place. If yellow is 0, each letter in that guess is either exactly right or not in the word. Nothing is misplaced.
- Change one letter at a time. If two guesses differ by a single letter and the green count moves by 1, that letter decides it. This is the core Word500 technique.
- Keep letters in the same slot across rows. A letter played in one fixed position over several guesses turns the counts into a test of that one slot.
- Mark as you go.Use the tile colours as your own notebook: red for ruled out, green for proven. It’s what Kenny does on screen, and Word500 lets you cycle marks by clicking a letter.
Worked example: SLOOP, 27 September 2026
| Guess | Green | Yellow | Red | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WHICH | 0 | 0 | 5 | W, H, I and C are all out |
| STARE | 1 | 0 | 4 | Exactly one of S, T, A, R, E is right and in place |
| GLOVE | 2 | 0 | 3 | Two of G, L, O, V, E are right and in place |
| FLUKE | 1 | 0 | 4 | One of F, L, U, K, E is right and in place |
| GLAND | 1 | 0 | 4 | One of G, L, A, N, D is right and in place |
Notice the yellow column is 0 on every row. Every letter tested was either exactly right or not in the word. L sat in slot 2in GLOVE, FLUKE and GLAND, and each of those rows had at least one green. That is the thread Kenny pulls. He locks L in slot 2, O in slot 3 (GLOVE’s second green) and S in slot 1 (STARE’s single green). That gives S L O _ _, and the answer is SLOOP, with a double O a Word500 player wouldn’t expect.
It’s also why the video is called “this is too confusing…”. Two O’s in a row is exactly the case where count-only feedback gets hard. Our double-letter guide covers how normal Wordle scores repeats, which is the instinct you have to unlearn here.
Where can you play Color Masked or Colour Swap Wordle?
There’s no official Color Masked or Colour Swap mode in the New York Times game. Both are custom challenges built for the videos, so here’s how to get the same experience:
- Color Masked: play Word500 at word500.com. It uses the identical green, yellow and red count feedback, with a new daily word for each language and difficulty level.
- Colour Swap: have a friend relay your result using a secret colour code, or play a normal game and translate each row through a mapping you picked in advance, like the rotation in the table above. It sounds silly, but it trains the same decoding muscle.
- Other daily twists from the same series:“Covered”, “Tetris Covered” and “Audio Only” Wordle. More Wordle alternatives are in our round-up.
A standard Wordle solverstill helps once you’ve translated the feedback into real green, yellow and gray. It can’t read masked counts directly, though, because it needs to know which letter got which result.
Sources and further reading
- Kenny Haller: Color Swap Daily Wordle (9/24) and Color Masked Daily Wordle Word 500 (9/27), the original challenge videos.
- Word500: how to play for the count-based rules.
- Every Wordle answer ever for the dates and answers used in the worked examples.
- Editorial policy for how we verify these guides.