Emoji Anagram shows you a short row of emojis and a set of empty letter slots. The emojis either spell the answer out in pieces or point at it sideways, and you uncover it by guessing letters. Nothing can end the round early — your score is simply how few wrong letters it took you.
Two emojis, and the slots show a five-letter word followed by a four-letter one. Honey and moon give you HONEY MOON, and the letters do the rest of the work: there are nine slots but only six different letters in them. Guessing O alone fills three of the nine — the O in HONEY and both Os in MOON — and N fills two more. Six correct taps clear the board, which is why a repeated-letter answer is far cheaper than its length suggests.
Many days are rebus-style: each emoji is a syllable or a whole small word, and the answer is those pieces bolted together. A car and a dog are not about vehicles or pets — they are CAR and PET. Before you guess a single letter, try saying the emojis aloud in order and see whether the sounds make something.
The number of words and the length of each is given away before you guess anything. Two words of five and four rule out most single-word readings; a single three-letter word rules out almost everything. Fit your reading of the emojis to the shape rather than guessing letters and hoping.
A and O are in almost every long answer and each hit can fill several slots at once, which is cheap information. E is the most common letter in English generally but it is missing from plenty of short answers, so it is not the free tap it looks like — guess it after you have a rough idea of the phrase rather than reflexively.
Once you think the answer is HONEYMOON, the best tap is not the next most frequent letter in English — it is Y, because a hit confirms the whole reading and a miss tells you immediately that you are wrong. Testing your theory costs the same as a blind guess and tells you far more.
The letter it hands you is worth one tap; the written clue is worth the whole puzzle when the emojis are being cryptic rather than literal. If you are staring at emojis with no idea whether they are pieces of a word or a description of a concept, the clue resolves that in one go.