One secret word, four clues from cryptic to plain, and more points the fewer clues you need. Here is how to gamble well.
Hunch reveals up to four clues about a secret word, and they are written in a deliberate order. The first clue is the most sideways: a riddle, an image, a joke about the thing. The second describes what it does or how people use it. The third is nearly literal. The fourth tells you the starting letter and the length. Points fall as clues are revealed, so the whole game is deciding how early your hunch is worth trusting.
Solving on clue one pays the most, and first clues are fairer than they look: they almost always describe one specific property that only a few things have. Read the clue and let two or three candidates surface, then ask which candidate the clue would be written about. "You can't outrun it, but a passing cloud can make it vanish" fits nothing in the world as perfectly as it fits its answer, and that is the trick of the genre: the right answer clicks, while the almost-right one needs excuses.
If two answers genuinely both click, take the second clue instead of coin-flipping. A wrong guess costs you nothing except the pride of the early solve, but the clue you would have revealed anyway is free information.
Wordcade accepts reasonable alternate answers where they truly mean the same thing: common synonyms, British and American spellings, and everyday regional words. If your answer is right but phrased differently, try the ordinary word for the thing before assuming you are wrong. When the fourth clue arrives, the starting letter and length end all doubt: fit your remaining candidate to the pattern before you type.
Your stats track your best single-round score, and the daily Hunch is part of the Perfect Day: win all three daily games on the first try and you earn bonus tokens plus a Streak Shield that can rescue a missed day later. On dailies, that changes the math: a confident clue-two solve that keeps the run alive beats a heroic clue-one gamble that ends it. Save the hero guesses for the archive, where practicing old puzzles costs your streak nothing.