Your First Move

Developing a good first move can be the most significant step toward lowering your score in Xypher.

Why?

Because your goal is to narrow the number of possible solutions as quickly as possible so that you can make a full-board guess and still learn something if you are wrong. What do I mean by that? If you tried to guess the whole board at once on the first guess, with no information about where any specific colors lie, it's likely you would get a score that would be difficult, if not impossible, to interpret. By "interpret", I mean have any idea which circles are correct and which are not.

Let's take a look at an example. If you try to guess the whole board on your first guess, you may get something useful, or you may get something like this:

Every row and column has at least one correct circle in it. This means that ALL the scores overlap, so it is impossible to eliminate any circles from the solution whatsoever.

On the other hand, you may get something useful:

In this case, you know that the circles in row 3, columns 1 and 2 are correct because there are only correct circles in one row.

Or, you might get this:

The point is that if you try to guess the entire board in your first guess, you are leaving the results up to chance and maximizing the odds that you won't learn much from your guess.

The opposite strategy is to make a guess where you know you will learn something:

By selecting a circle that there is only one of and placing it in every space on the board, you are guaranteed to be able to locate that circle - there is only one intersecting row and column!

You can "brute force" your way through an entire game this way if you want. It's a great way to learn. But the best way to lower your score is to find an opening guess somewhere between the examples here - one that can tell you more about the board than a single circle, but also a guess that's likely to return results you can use.

What's your best opening guess?