BLUFF is a free word game with poker structure. Six players sit at a table and the deal rotates, so each player sets the secret word exactly once. The setter picks a word of four, five or six letters, gives the table exactly one clue about it, and names a price. Everyone else decides whether to pay that price for four guesses, or fold. Cracking the word in the first three guesses beats the setter; missing pays them.
Wordle tells you what to guess. BLUFF makes you decide whether to guess at all. In Wordle everyone solves the same puzzle and a hard word is bad luck. In BLUFF a person chose the word and the clue specifically to beat you, and you choose whether that clue is worth paying for. The best players are not the ones with the biggest vocabulary — they are the ones who fold when a clue is a trap.
Yes. BLUFF is free to download and the daily is free forever — it costs no stars, needs no stake, and nothing you could buy would move you up its board. Stars are an in-game score: you win them at the table, and you can buy a pack if you would rather not wait for the free stake that arrives every four hours. They buy your table's looks and act as your stake, and they never leave the game — they cannot be cashed out, sold or transferred. Power-ups are earned in play and are never sold. There is one advert, a video you can choose to watch in exchange for a stake; there are no banners and nothing interrupts a hand. Power-ups are earned at the table rather than sold.
No. BLUFF has no cash prizes and no purchases of any kind — there is no money in the game at all. The top three on the daily board take 3,000, 1,500 and 750 stars, an in-game score that buys cosmetic looks, cannot be bought with money and cannot be cashed out. There is no age gate and the game is suitable for all ages.
No. Stars can be bought but never cashed out, sold or transferred, so nothing of value is ever at stake and there is no mechanism by which a player can stake money on an outcome. The daily is a contest of skill: every player in the world is dealt the identical six deals and the board ranks how well each person played that fixed problem.
Four, five or six letters, mixed within a single match, so the length changes from hand to hand. Four-letter words are cracked about a third of the time and six-letter words about two thirds: a shorter word hides less, but it also gives a guess less to grip. The length of a hand is a read in itself, before the clue arrives.
The BLUFF deck is 3,576 answer words: 953 of four letters, 1,394 of five and 1,229 of six. Each one is shown with a pronunciation and a plain-English meaning when the hand ends. Guesses are checked against a wider list of 20,429 words, so a guess has to be a real word — nonsense probes that test fresh letters are refused.
Yes. Every tile state in BLUFF carries a shape as well as a colour: a filled dot for a letter pinned to its position, a hollow diamond for a letter in the word but somewhere else, and a slash for a letter that is not there. The marks are on by default, so the clue never depends on colour vision.
Every player in the world is dealt the same six deals each day — the same words, the same clues, the same prices — until midnight UTC, so the board ranks decisions rather than luck. Your device sends the six decisions you made and the server re-scores them itself, so a score cannot be submitted, only the play that produced it. The top three take 3,000, 1,500 and 750 stars.
No. There is no login, no password and no email. Your handle, rating, record and stars live on your own device, and nothing is tracked. The only thing sent anywhere is the set of decisions from that day's six deals, so the daily board can re-score them and rank the day.
Yes. BLUFF installs to a phone home screen as a progressive web app, and the whole game — all 3,576 words with their pronunciations and meanings — is cached on the first visit, so it opens with no network at all. Only the daily board needs a connection, and a run played offline is sent the next time the game opens.
The app is in preparation for both stores. In the meantime the full game runs in any browser at webluff.com/play and installs to a home screen from there, works offline afterwards, and is the same build — nothing is held back for a store version.
A tell is the single clue the setter gives the table about their secret word. It is one of three kinds: a letter pinned to a position, a letter confirmed present without a position, or two letters ruled out entirely. No tell may leave more than a third of the words of that length standing, so a setter cannot starve the table into folding.
Because calling costs stars and a bad clue is a losing bet. A tell that rules out two rare letters says almost nothing; a pinned vowel is real information. Folding costs only the ante, and on the daily board a laydown that nobody else could beat actually scores — being right to refuse is a skill BLUFF measures.