Games like Wordle: daily puzzles worth a bookmark
One puzzle a day, the same for everybody, done in five minutes. Here is what actually kept working after the clones died.
The thing that made Wordle work was never the word game. It was the format: one puzzle a day, identical for everyone, short enough to finish, and a result you could share as a grid of coloured squares without spoiling anything.
Almost every direct clone died, and the ones that survived did it by keeping that format and changing the mechanic underneath - Connections being the clearest example. So this list is organised around the format rather than around guessing five-letter words.
Three of the daily puzzles below are ours. The rest are not, and several of them are better than anything we make - they are linked so you can go and play them.
Daily puzzles on this site
Hieroglyph
Daily Picture Puzzle
The closest thing here to a daily word game. Five sentences drawn as rows of pictures, one picture per word, and you type the sentence back. Ten tries for the whole game rather than per sentence, which is where the tension comes from. Daily and Quick draw from completely separate sentence banks, so you cannot farm quick games to spoil the daily.
Twine
Daily Connect the Dots Puzzle
A daily logic puzzle rather than a word one. Connect every pair of dots without crossing, and - the rule that makes it hard - fill every square of the grid. Every daily is verified to have exactly one solution before it ships. Also comes as Kitty Twine and Twine Pics, each with its own separate daily.
Paint Mix
Daily Color Mixing Puzzle
Which of five pigments were mixed to make this colour? Eight rounds, one shared set a day, a medal at the end. It is deducible rather than guessable, which is the property that makes a daily worth returning to.
Blink Shift
Daily Spot the Difference Game
Memorise a grid, watch it blink, spot what changed. Ten rounds, one shared game a day, and no timer on the answers at all. A memory daily rather than a knowledge one.
True Colors
Daily Color Quiz
The one-minute option. Five colour swatches, four names each, one shared quiz a day. The right size for the gap where you would otherwise refresh a news site.
The dailies worth playing elsewhere
These are the survivors, with an honest note on each. Several are better daily puzzles than anything on this site.
Wordle
Free
The original, now at the New York Times and still free to play. If you are looking for games like Wordle and have not simply carried on playing Wordle, that is the first thing to reconsider.
Connections
Free
The only post-Wordle daily that genuinely surpassed it. Sort sixteen words into four groups of four; the difficulty is entirely in the deliberate overlaps between categories. The best daily puzzle currently running.
Contexto
Free, ad-supported
Guess the secret word; each guess is ranked by semantic closeness. Unlimited guesses, so it is a long, absorbing puzzle rather than a five-minute one - the opposite end of the daily format from Wordle.
Waffle
Free
Swap letters around a waffle-shaped grid to fix six words in fifteen moves. Purely deductive with no guessing from nothing, which makes it the most satisfying of the direct Wordle descendants.
Nerdle
Free
Wordle with arithmetic - guess the hidden equation. Genuinely different to solve rather than a reskin, and the pick for anyone who found the vocabulary part of Wordle the boring bit.
Worldle
Free
Identify a country from its silhouette, with distance and direction hints after each guess. The best of the geography dailies, and it teaches you something.
Puzzmo
Freemium
A whole daily puzzle suite - crossword, word games, logic games - with unusually good design. Not a single daily but a place to get several, and the closest thing to a modern puzzle page.
What makes a daily stick
Three things, consistently. It has to be finishable in one sitting, or people stop starting it. Everyone has to get the same puzzle, or comparing results means nothing. And the result has to be shareable without spoiling the answer, which is what the coloured-square grid was actually for.
The clones that failed all kept the five-letter word and dropped one of those three. The successes - Connections, Waffle, Nerdle - kept all three and changed the mechanic entirely. That is the pattern worth applying to anything new in this genre, and it is the pattern the dailies on this site are built on.
Frequently asked questions
Is Wordle still free?
Yes. It moved to the New York Times but the daily puzzle remains free to play; the paid subscription covers the wider Games catalogue and the archive.
What is the best game like Wordle?
Connections, comfortably, if you want the best daily puzzle. Waffle if you specifically want the deductive word-grid feel. Nerdle if you liked the structure but not the vocabulary.
Do the daily puzzles here reset at midnight?
They reset at local midnight in your own timezone, so everybody in the same timezone gets the same puzzle for the whole calendar day. Your streak is kept in your own browser using that same local date.