How to play Crosswordle? Everything to know about the Sudoku Wordle crossover 

Crosswordle is every wordsmith and puzzle lover's heaven (or hell, depending on how difficult you find it). This spin-off is a brilliant crossover between Sudoku and the internet's resident favorite word-guessing game, Wordle.

The game challenges players to essentially reverse-engineer a Wordle grid whose final answer is already provided. You might find yourself debating if the game's really all that difficult if the final answer is already available, but its innumerable error alerts will have you rethinking that fast enough.

Designed by Reddit user ymichael and his wife, the game was released on January 31.

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Explained: Guidelines and error alerts of Crosswordle

Upon opening the game, players are greeted with an incomplete grid with only the last row filled out which contains the solved Wordle solution. Crosswordle invites players to play as if they were guessing the secret word as usual, but with a few delicious twists.

The grid has a few stray green and yellow colored blank tiles peppered in, which may seem random, but there is a method to this madness. Crosswordle mimics the original game's signature color scheme of green, yellow, and gray tiles, which signify correct, partially correct, and incorrect guesses, respectively.

While making their guesses, players can only use the letters that constitute the final solution in these colored tiles. In green tiles, the letter corresponding to that column needs to be placed in that exact position. For the yellow tiles, any of the remaining letters can be used on the condition that they are deliberately placed in the wrong positions.

For instance, in the solution posted above, 'C' and 'A' need to be mandatorily used in the first two letters of the second last row while any of the remaining letters 'P', 'U', or 'T' can be placed in the other yellow tile.

Crosswordle ups the ante several notches with its seven error alerts that guide players to one of the numerous possible solutions to the grid. The letters that are signaled wrong are earmarked with a red flag on the top right.

The error alerts are:

Letter doesn’t appear in the final row: This is displayed when the letters used by players in the colored tiles do not correspond with the letters that appear in the final row.

Letter appears in the last row: Crosswordle prevents players from placing any of the letters from the final word in a gray tile. Gray tiles are supposed to signify an incorrect guess that doesn't appear in the solution in Wordle.

Letter appears in the same position as the last row: This alert pops up when a yellow tile letter is in the exact corresponding position as the last row. These would normally be marked in green for a correct guess in the original Wordle.

Non-valid words: All words guessed need to be valid words that exist.

Letter used in a previous row: This is where the Sudoku aspect of Crosswordle comes into play. Like Sudoku, players cannot repeat letters that have previously been used in prior rows.

Letter used more than it occurs: If a letter does not occur more than once in the final row then the player cannot use it more than once in their guess either.

Should use letters previously found: This is in line with Wordle's hard mode where the letters that are correctly guessed (both green and yellow) are mandated to be used in subsequent guesses.

A comprehensive understanding of these error alerts is a pre-requisite for players to successfully complete Crosswordle. The game may seem extremely convoluted on paper, but players should get a hang of it fairly quickly once they begin playing.