Jotto is a game of logic and words.
The computer has chosen a five letter word, called the target. Your task is to deduce that word. The word comes from a list of more than 3,000 known words. A word may have any combination of letters (including duplicates).
This is the panel on the left-most side of the program's user interface. It has rows of boxes. You'll type one letter per box in the active row. Then press the "Guess" button. The computer will compare your guessed word against the target word. Beside your guess it will tell you how many exact and partial matches there are. An exact match has the same letter in the same position in both your guess and the target. A partial match is a letter in your guess that is also in the target, but is not an exact match.
Here are some examples:
Word Pairs Exact Partial louse
purse2 exact matches (s and e) 1 partial match (u) queue
queer3 exact matches (q, u, and e) 1 partial match (the last e) queue
feats0 exact matches 1 partial match (e)
The New Game panel has four controls:
You may categorize the letters of the alphabet to help you in your deductions. There are four categories that can be assigned:
You can categorize a letter yourself by simply clicking on it. It is assigned to the category shown in the drop-down menu on the left of the panel.
The color assigned to each category can be changed using the Color Preferences sub-panel. For each category, simply choose your preferred color from the corresponding drop-down menu.
The feedback panel will give you information in the following circumstances:
There are a variety of hints offered. Choose the number of hints you would like from the left-most drop-down menu. Choose the type of hint from the next drop-down menu. Most hints find words that either have a or do not have a particular letter or set of letters. Choose the letter(s) from the drop-down menu in the middle. In the case of a set of letters, you may either choose one of the categories assigned to the letters or you may type in your own set. Then press the "Get Hint" button and corresponding word(s) will be displayed.
The "words consistent with previous guesses" hint deserves extra explanation. It goes through each word in the list of known words and asks the question: "If this word was the target, would I get exactly the same answers as were actually given?" If the answer is "yes", the word is included in the hint. If it is not, the word is excluded.