How to play
Select four colours from the palette to form your guess. Submit the guess. The feedback row shows black pegs (correct position) and white pegs (correct colour, wrong position). Use the feedback to refine your next guess. You have ten total guesses to crack the code.
Game features
- Faithful 1970 ruleset with selectable colour count
- Difficulty modes from four to eight colours
- Optional duplicate-colour permission (advanced)
- Hint system suggests possible remaining codes
- Strategy stats: average guesses to solve, fastest solve
- Daily seeded code for cross-player comparison
Editor review
Mastermind is a deceptively deep game whose computational properties have been studied formally by mathematicians. The classical six-colour, four-position version has an optimal strategy that guarantees a solve in five guesses, but most human players take six or seven. Mastermind digital implementations preserve the format while adding the computational support that human play benefits from.
The difficulty modes are well-calibrated. Four colours produces a small enough search space to solve via systematic elimination; six colours (the classic) requires inference and best-guess strategy; eight colours produces a search space too large to exhaust within ten guesses and demands aggressive information-gathering early.
The hint system shows the count of remaining valid codes consistent with the feedback so far. Used as intended (after committing to a guess) it teaches the format; used pre-emptively it trivialises the game. Recommended for logic-deduction enthusiasts.