A Jotto Project

What is Jotto?
Basic strategies
Intermediate strategies
Advanced strategies
Further fun
Files
Links

What is Jotto?

Jotto is a game in which two players take turns trying to guess each others' secret five-letter word. The rules can be found here. Technically, Jotto is the trademarked name for a slight variant on a generic game (sometimes named Jot). All that Jotto does is add some problematic rules about scoring. Mostly, when people discuss playing Jotto, unless they have the official scoring pads, they're really talking about Jot.

Basic strategies

Scoring zero on a word is very helpful. (Scoring five is more helpful, but we'll ignore that for now.) Once you have eliminated some letters, you can use them as controls to check other letters, with minimum logical work.
Don't choose, as your secret word, an object in the room with you. The same object may provide inspiration for one of your opponent's guesses. (I once lost in one turn that way.)
If your logic leads to a contradiction, then while you're double-checking it, ask your opponent to double-check the answers they gave you.
Don't pick a secret word that you expect your opponent not to know. That's just mean.

Intermediate strategies

Use binary logic (in which each letter has a truth value corresponding to whether it is in your opponent's secret word), and come up with your own notation if you want. If the game runs long, you can frequently make deductions by exploring hypotheticals. (For example, on a corner of your paper, figure out what all the consequences would be if your opponent's word contained an "s". If this leads to a contradiction, you know that the word cannot contain an "s".)
While not playing, come up with a set of good initial words to guess. This might mean words which have the potential to be changed a bit at a time in many different ways, or several words that share as few letters as possible. (The first such set that I figured out, after a half-hour with a pen and paper, was "quack; vixen; fjord; tombs (or wombs); glyph". These cover twenty-four letters, with only the "o" repeated.) This can help you quickly narrow down your opponent's possible letters.

There are things to be said for and against several tactics for choosing your secret word.

Uncommon letters will usually take longer for your opponent to find, so words with Z or X can be useful.
If your word contains five common letters, it can (sometimes) be very difficult for your opponent to score a zero. This results in more intricate and less productive logic.
Double (or even triple) letters in your word frequently take a long time for your opponent to locate.
Conversely, the fewer distinct letters your word contains, the easier it is for your opponent to narrow down the choices.
Also, if doubled letters appear together, the word may occur (phonetically) to your opponent before they even deduce that you have a double letter.
Anagrams. In terms of strategy, there's nothing wrong with them, and they have everything going for them. If your secret word is "onset," then even after figuring out your letters, your opponent might first guess "notes," "steno," "stone," "seton," or "tones" (assuming they know these words), which will buy you valuable time to win.
Don't use this tactic exclusively, if you want to keep your friends. You'll annoy people by always using words with eight or more anagrams. Most people (in my limited experience) don't mind being made to guess two or three anagrams, though; it keeps things entertaining.

Advanced strategies

For every guessing strategy, there is a class of words against which it is least effective. (And I don't just mean anagrams.) If your opponent becomes predictable, use that to your advantage in selecting your secret word. For example, if someone always guesses "quack; vixen; fjord; tombs; glyph," use one letter from each of those in your secret word. (e.g., "crimp".)
Allow more information to come from each guess. Avoid making guesses that can only have two possible scores.
For example, let's say (for the sake of illustration) that you have made the following guesses:
DINGO - 2
GRAFT - 0
DRIFT - 1
Do the logic and then write, off to the side, "DI=1" and "NO=1". Many players would, at this point, take one guess (e.g., DRAFT) to get the D or I, and another guess (e.g., GRANT) to get the N or O. However, what if you test one letter from each pair (e.g., FAINT)? If it scores zero or two, then you have pinned down both secret letters (DO or IN) at once! And if it scores one, although that's ambiguous, you will have logically linked "DI=1" with "NO=1" via "IN=1": Testing any one of those letters will now tell you the state of all four. (e.g., if DRAFT scores 1, then there's a D, so there's no I, so there's an N, so there's no O.)
This strategy, in the abstract, can be extended to larger amounts of information. Instead of carefully narrowing down your letters, guess words that have a wide range of possible scores. At either end of the range, you'll gain a great deal of information. And even in the middle, you'll have information that, while ambiguous now, will be useful later on.
For example, in one game, I made the following guesses:
QUACK - 1
VIXEN - 1
GLYPH - 2
TOMBS - 1
Having hit all five letters in the secret word, I selected the most common letter from each guess (the two most common from GLYPH), and arranged them into my next guess, LATHE. (These were the most common letters by written English usage, not by Jotto frequency. Oops.) I figured that was likely to score two or three, and would provide a very useful link between my previous guesses. Once I narrowed down the results from LATHE, I very likely would have confirmed the secret letters from two of my guesses, and have eliminated some letters from the other two. As it turned out, though, LATHE scored four, so I won in short order.

Further fun

For some variety, play Jotto with six-letter words. Or four. Or three. Or ten, if you're good with logic and have a decent vocabulary (and a lot of time on your hands).
Try changing the rules slightly, so that scoring five correct letters wins the game. Good playing is then about logic, not guessing anagrams.
You don't have to play with official Jotto pads and scoring; just play to win. In this case, if someone reports an erroneous score for a word, and their opponent has completed another guess, it may be considered a forfeit. (The game may still be played out for fun.) Alternately, any guesses made after the erroneous score are not counted against that player's number of guesses.
Two Jotto words have only two distinct letters: "mamma" and "esses". 253 Jotto words have three distinct letters.
The five Jotto words with "Q" and no "U" are "faqir," "qaids," "qanat," "qophs," and "tranq".
Two Jotto words have no vowels (though technically, the "W" serves as a vowel in the first of these): "crwth" and "phpht". Thirty-four Jotto words have "Y" as their only vowel.
Letter frequency in Jotto is a bit different from the "etaoinshrdlu" which you might know for written English. Here are all the letters, arranged by the number of Jotto words in which they appear, in descending order: searoiltnudcypmhgbkfwvzxjq

Files (Last updated 12/15/07)

I spent a great deal of time creating these files, which I provide here free of charge. If you use them, please consider visiting the tip jar. Thank you.

The word list. (60k) I have compiled a list of 8,659 words allowed in Jotto. All of these are five-letter English words that can be found, uncapitalized, in a dictionary. (To avoid confusion, I'll mention that some of these have more familiar usages as proper nouns. Many can be found in only one or two dictionaries. And many of them are wholly unfamiliar to me.) If you find a valid word that is not in this file, please e-mail to me both the word and the name of the dictionary in which it can be found. (Here's a hint: I'm probably missing some slang words.)
The anagrams list. (27k) This is an exhaustive list of anagrams from my word list. It is ordered according to the number of anagrams of each word.
Combos. (150k) This is a list of 4,328 sets of great opening guess words. Each set has five words that span twenty-four letters, with the doubled letter contained within a single word. (Thus, they are more useful than the set I mentioned above, in which the repeated "O" could cause ambiguous results.)

Links

Doug Walker's Jotto game is not competitive: Only you guess. It is also a vehicle for demonstrating his killer six-word opening strategy.
Augie Hill's Jotto game. It gives you a letterboard for noting known letters, or (somewhat) infers them for you given the available information. As with the previous one, only you guess. This one does not allow double letters.

Return to the games cabinet.