The New York Times acquisition of Wordle has left devotees of the mega-hit word guessing game fearful that it will – like the newspaper’s crossword and other puzzles – end up locked behind a paywall, despite the Times’ assurances to the contrary.
While it’s unlikely that any other game will achieve the viral success of Wordle, there are free, browser-based alternatives out there to puzzle over as you sip your morning coffee.
Clones and spin-offs
Wordle’s creator, Josh Wardle, has said he loves the plethora of Wordle clones that have sprung up in his game’s wake, though his fans have been less impressed by apps trying to cash in on his work. Most clones copy Wordle’s current ethos: they don’t cost anything to play, run in a browser and are ad-free.
Variants range from straight-up copies (often without Wordle’s one-game-a-day limit and with additional difficulty options) to versions in other languages, including Chinese and Tamil. There are the themed versions too, featuring swearwords, queer culture and Pokémon.
Then there are the truly bizarre – like Letterle, which asks you to guess a single letter, Absurdle, self-described as “adversarial Wordle”, and word.rodeo, which lets you create custom challenges for a friend. My group chat is obsessed with Numble, in which players reverse-engineer a maths equation, and Quordle, where you play four games of Wordle at once.
Other traditional games
The New York Times has a handful of well-designed, minimalist-looking games available outside its paywall, including Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee, though the latter does ask you to subscribe once you guess enough words.
Play Four by Merriam-Webster is a spin on the mini-crossword that offers a one-a-day fix, while there are the old standbys of online Sudoku and my personal obsession, Nonograms (better known to Nintendo fans as Picross).
Of course, there’s always the Guardian’s various offerings online or on iOS or Android – though the apps do require a paid subscription.
Wikitrivia
This game requires players to place random historical facts into chronological order. Wikitrivia starts with one historical event already on the board. You then begin drawing cards and placing them on a timeline relative to the other events in play. Was Australia discovered before or after the founding of the Indian stock exchange? When did the Regency period end relative to the birth of Catherine de’ Medici?
You can make three mistakes before the game ends, with the score showing how many cards you managed to place correctly before messing up. Sharing your results is possible but, given the random nature of each run, it feels somewhat pointless.
The nice thing about Wikitrivia, as the Guardian’s Alyx Gorman says, is it makes you feel smart – you need to have some knowledge of when things happened, at least relative to other things, and having that knowledge confirmed (however trivial) is a satisfying little experience. That has its downsides, too: how could I possibly have known that Rashi, a French rabbi and commentator, was born in 1040? That’s trivia for you.
GeoGuessr
Ever used Google street view? GeoGuessr dumps you in a random place on Earth – at least, the parts of Earth that have been mapped by Google – and challenges you to guess where in the world you are, giving you more points the closer your guess is to the mark. You will need to sign up for an account though, which is a bit annoying.
In classic mode you can roam around a bit, with five guesses to score as many points as possible, starting a new location with every guess. There are a bunch of different modes that limit you to various countries, or place you only near landmarks, and the “daily challenge” feature replicates the group one-a-day nature of Wordle.
The genius of GeoGuessr is that it makes you feel like a detective, even if what you’re doing is the most basic detective work imaginable. Signs especially are invaluable for determining the primary language in your mystery location, but other context clues – forms of architecture, the flora and fauna, the side of the road cars are driving on, and so on – activate your brain in a way most other puzzle games don’t.
Of course, sometimes GeoGuessr just dumps you on a long stretch of barren highway next to some terrain you’ve never seen; you’ll just have to blindly guess and hope for the best. On a free account you can only play for five minutes every 15 minutes, but that’s more than enough to get your daily fix in.
