Cinco Help
The Object of the Game
Rules of the Game
Playing an IR Game
Strategy and Tips
The object of the game
Cinco is a beguilingly simple word puzzle which challenges you to guess a mystery five letter word. As with crossword puzzles, you must use both logic and your "word smarts." The goal is to guess the word in as few tries as possible.
Use the Keyboard to enter your guesses. Cinco will tell you how many of the letters in your guess are in the mystery word, and how many of those letters are in the correct position. Make subsequent guesses to determine what the mystery word is.
You can click on individual positions in the guess word to enter individual letters. For instance, say you think the mystery word starts with R and ends with ES. You can enter:
This helps you visualize possible solutions.
On the right side of the display, CINCO provides a handy scratch pad to help you keep track of what letters you think might be in the mystery word, or which letters you think you have eliminated. Tap a letter once to cross it out; once more to make it bold.
Rules of the Game
- All the mystery words will be 5 letters long. The mystery word will not contain any repeated letters.
- Your word guesses must be English words, but they may contain repeated letters.
- After each guess, you will be told how many matching letters your word guess contains, and how many of these matching letters are also in their correct position in the mystery word. For example, if the mystery word is CARDS and you guess RAMPS,
Cinco will show you:
- This indicates that both your guess and the mystery word contain R, A and S, and that the A and S are in the correct position. However, you must figure out which letters match and which are in the correct position.
- As you try more guesses, you will be able to eliminate certain letters entirely, and rule out certain letters from certain positions. Eventually, by choosing your guesses carefully, you will have enough information to guess the mystery word.
Playing an IR Game
- To send a mystery word to another player over IR, tap IR Send Game on the Game menu.
- You can either enter a word to send to the other player, or tap the Randomize button to let the game select the word.
- If you select Randomize, then you can play along with the other player by selecting the Play along! check box.
- Once you have selected the mystery work, tap the Send button to send the mystery word to the other player. Make sure that the two IR ports are aligned.
Strategy and tips
- The key to winning CINCO lies in picking your guesses carefully. You must incorporate knowledge about what letters are likely to show in certain positions in words and what letters are most common overall. The most common letters, roughly in order, are: EATONRISH
- As you pick guesses, you need to incorporate information from your previous guesses. For instance, say you made the following two initial guesses:
Guess | Match | InPlace |
PAPER | 1 | 1 |
CRIES | 1 | 0 |
- Your second guess contained only two letters in common with your first guess, the letter E and the letter R. But, since you kept E in the same place, and your In Place count dropped to zero, you can completely eliminate E as a possibility. Tap the E button once in the scratch pad to the right to cross it out. R might be a possibility, but you can't say anything definite so far.
Guess | Match | InPlace |
PAPPY | 0 | 0 |
- This guess and result allows you to not only completely eliminate P, A, and Y, but now you also know that R was the letter that counted in the first two guesses. Furthermore, you now know that R was the correct letter in the second guess as well, so you can cross out C, I and S. Continue picking guesses to let you narrow down the list of possible letters and the positions they can be in.
- By planning your guesses carefully, and maybe getting a little lucky, you'll soon be able to solve words in 8-12 guesses, or so. With still more attention, you'll be able to get your average guess count down to the 5-6 guess range. We'll leave it to you to develop the strategies that will let you win regularly in so few guesses-- it can be done.
Have fun playing CINCO!