The Goal: To guess the opponent's chosen word in as few guesses as possible.
The Mechanism: You guess a word, and are told how many letters present in your guessed word are in the chosen word and are in the correct place in the word, and how many are in the chosen word, but are in the wrong place in the word. This is notated as Xc Yw, where X and Y represent the number of letters in the correct location, and the number of letters in the wrong location. Note that letters that are not in the chosen word are not reported.
Restrictions: You cannot choose a word with more than one of the same letter. You cannot use a word that is a proper noun, acronym, or an abbreviation.
Example 1: You've chosen the word "tale". Your opponent guesses "gate". You report 2c 1w. The 2c refers to the "a" and "e" which are in the correct location in the word. The 1w refers to the "t" since it was in the first position in your chosen word, and was in the 3rd position in the guessed word. Note that you don't include the "l" in the information you give back, since it wasn't in your chosen word.
Example 2: You've chosen the word "tale". Your opponent guesses "sick". You report 0c.