How To Win & Pwn Your Friends at Hanging With Friends Part 2: Solving the Puzzle

If you haven’t read the first part of this post, click here to read. The first post cover how to build a good puzzle for your opponent to solve, and how to gain lots of points, and also how to cheat while building your puzzle.
Now onto the second part of the Hanging With Friends game play, which is solving the puzzle that given to you by your opponent. And the format will be similar with Part 1, which in this post I will explain in details how do you make the correct choice while solving the puzzle and win, and also how to cheat.

Hanging With Friends Part 2: Solving the Puzzle

Try the most frequently used letter first. Like E for vowel and T or S for consonant. Wikipedia and some other sites provide some great statistic about letter frequency and also pattern frequency in English words, have them in mind, it will help you to get more clues to solve the puzzle!

Figure out the vowel(s) in the puzzle does make your guessing easier. And since Hanging With Friends already provided you the last vowel in the word, make use of them. If it is a long word, do try to figure out by trying E then O, I, and finally U. You wont need to try them all if you think you’ve got all the vowels in the word.

Try frequently used combination at the end of the word, like ES, ING, ED, ER. Your opponent tends to do that, and it will be easy for you when you’ve figure out the word is noun/verb/adjective.

Use your lifeline! Out of the three lifelines given to you, “suspect” lifeline is most useful. Lifelines cost 20 coins, it isnt cheap so use it only when you really need it. For every new component you play with, you will have the first tips for free (doesnt cost you coins), and after that, each tips will cost 20 coins, and to get 20 coins is to score a total of 200 (across all the games) to gain the bonus.
So you might be wondering, WHEN to use the lifeline? I’ll say when you solved the puzzle up till ONLY 2 unknown letters or less, and you have high chance to win the game, then only use it. “Suspect” lifeline will highlight 4 letters, and only one of them is correct. If you get it wrong, you’ll lose a strike. Try figuring out which one is most likely to be the correct one.

The word dont seems to have any vowels (or the “lack of vowels), try the letter Y. I’ve been in the situation before, and before you ragequit the game, try the letter Y. Its magical.

One of my way of solving puzzle is to it out loud. Substitute the letter into the word one by one and read them. It helps! I found I missed some obvious one by reading them out.

How to cheat

Sometimes, you’re stucked, and you just need a little bit help. There is where the cheating come in.
My favourite tools to solve the Hanging With Friends puzzle is worddetector.com. There are some tools out there that are specifically made for Hanging with Friends, but i found those tools usually lack the freedom of choice, and i found worddetector.com is easy to use.
To start, just go to their site and remember to switch to the Simple Search mode. Enter your puzzle by replacing unknown words with ?, for example: ???GI?G and it will show you a list of the possible words.
Well, with the list of words presented to you, it is up to you to decide which one is more probable.
Watch out for the selection of words, and remember the last vowel is provided to you, and by pick and choosing, you might just save yourself and win a game (by cheating). Haha.

Anyway, I dont recommend cheating, because by doing that, you lose all the fun element of the game.

If you have more tips and tricks to share, please leave them in the comment below.

Happy hanging and solving the puzzle!

joshuatly2011