Jotto Logic

In math today, we started a "year long tournament" for something called Jotto. The rules are simple:

1. Each team chooses a secret, 5 letter word. No repeating characters, no proper nouns, and it must be an English word.
   
2. Each team takes turns guessing a word. The other team tells them how many letters it shares with their secret word. ie: My word is blond. They guess other. I tell them 1, because both words have an o. Order does not matter.
   
3. Using logic and / or cheating methods, you need to guess the other team's word first.
   

I Googled a bit to find some strategy on how to play it, but was let down. I thought up a simple system of guessing a word then modifying it slightly to rule out letters. Vowels are the easiest, not sure where to go after that. Unfortunately, this was after I got home and we had gotten halfway through the game. I stored my thoughts in a text file for organization and make a branch of a word, it's mutations, and what each possible outcome of each mutation means for the letters.

"I" or "Impossible" means there is no way these letters can be in their word.
"K" or "Known" means I know these letters are in the word.
Everything else goes in limbo.

When two lines follow one number and a colon, it means one of those lines will happen but there is no way to know which. It's much cleaner than an "OR".

"AND" means both letters or both statements.
"OR" means one of the group, unless otherwise stated. It never means all statements can be true. 'This or that'.

 Spoiler

Code:

Impossible:
    s; t; i; c; k;
Known:
    
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    
bland (2):
    blond
        1:    o = I AND a = K
        2:    o AND a = I
            o AND a = K
        3:    a = I AND o = K
    blind
        1:    i = I AND a = K
        2:    i AND a = I
    blend
        1:    e = I AND a = K
        2:
            e AND a = I
            e AND a = K
        3:    a = I AND e = K
    brand
        1:    r = I AND l = K
        2:     r AND l = I
            r AND l = K
        3:    l = I AND r = K
    blunt
        0:    (u AND t = I) AND (a AND d = K)
        1:    a AND d AND u = K
            ( u = I) AND (a OR d = K)
        2:    (a OR d = K) AND (b or l or n = K) AND (u = K)
            (a AND d AND u = I) AND (b or l or n = K)(2/3)
        3:    (a AND d = I) AND (u = K) AND (b OR n OR l = K)(2/3 must be K)

List of words and their number from class.

Code:

shirt    1
flirt    1
stick    0
bland    2
nodes    1
dance    2
dorky    1
barns    2
bored    3

I'm looking for some help. Is my logic off? Did I miss an absolute when looking over the words, or did I mistype something in my mutations tree? Is there a better way to go about this?

I don't want to spend an hour working out what words to do in what order if I have a giant error right here.