My nightly routine, nowadays, is to sleep only after completing the next day’s Wordle, released every night around 1am. Then, I annoyingly proceed to share my results with a few of my Wordle-obsessed friends and hear what they have to say about today’s word’s difficulty.
If you haven’t heard of Wordle, it is an addictive puzzle invented by Josh Wardle that involves six attempts at guessing a five-letter word, with clues coming in the form of the colour your letters turn after you’ve entered your guess. If you’re like me and religiously play this viral word game Wordle every day, here are a few free online games to try out:
- Times mini crossword (plus a bunch of other games)
The New York Times offers six really fun word and visual games for free on their website. My favourite out of them is the Mini Crossword. It’s exactly what you guessed, a mini version of the popular Sunday staple, the New York Times Crossword. The website also has historical crosswords, like from 2016 or 2017, to try your hand at. If you’re just starting out or are intimidated by crossword puzzles, you should play with ‘Autocheck’ to help you out. Later, as you get the hang of things, you can play normally with no hints.
2. Crosswordle
In Crosswordle, you have to guess two words crossing each other within the minimum number of guesses. The game essentially has the same concept as Wordle: the right letter at the right place will turn green and the right letter at the wrong place will turn yellow. But it gets a lot more interesting when there’s two intersecting words to guess, not just one.
3. Nerdle
What Wordle is for words, Nerdle is for nerds maths. It’s a self-explanatory game where you have to guess an equation of linear algebra with the same rules as Wordle. If you’re not much of a word game person but like numbers, this one’s for you.
4. Absurdle
This is an adversarial version of Wordle. The one key difference between the two is that Absudle doesn’t have a secret word up its sleeve. Instead, the game plays with you by trying to keep the maximum number of words possible as the answer, and revealing minimum information to you. Simply put, the game essentially has 2315 words in its inventory and you must force the game to narrow the answer down to one word. Even though the game has unlimited attempts, try and do this in the minimum number of guesses. Expect a lot of grey squares before you reach the glorious all-green word.
5. Moviedle
This one’s for the movie buffs. The game shows you just one second of a trailer of a movie which you then must guess. For every wrong attempt or skipped turn, you get a second extra of the sped up trailer. After your sixth guess, you are shown the answer. Although it can get pretty tricky, the satisfaction you get when you know the movie is incomparable.
Personally, I treat these games as a healthy distraction when I want to take a short break from work, one that still keeps my mind working.