Word Games

Sixteen words, four hidden groups, four mistakes allowed. The traps are the entire point and they are very carefully set.

Guess the secret word and be told only how semantically close you got. Rank 4,000 feels like progress, and it very much is not.

Wordle in reverse: you are handed the green and yellow clues and have to reconstruct the guesses that could have produced them.

Thirty-two Wordle boards at once, thirty-seven guesses, no mercy. The logical end point of the whole 2022 craze.

Answer vocabulary questions and the ad revenue goes to the UN World Food Programme. Running since 2007 and still counting grains.

Free cryptic, quick and Everyman crosswords every day, plus the setter blogs that explain each diabolical clue afterwards.

Wordle for equations: eight tiles holding one arithmetic statement that has to balance as well as being correct.

Zach Gage's daily puzzle collection — Cross|word, Flipart, Really Bad Chess — with the best interface in the genre by a distance.

Four Wordle grids solved at the same time with nine shared guesses, which is exactly as stressful as that sounds.

A Wikipedia article with every meaningful word blacked out; guess words to reveal them until you can name the subject.

The original semantic-distance guessing game, noticeably harder than its descendants and considerably more humbling.

Seven letters, one compulsory centre letter, and the long climb from Solid to Genius. Ruins mornings extremely productively.

A daily letter grid with dozens of words buried in it, plus a bonus list that runs on far longer than anyone expects.

A word search with a theme you have to deduce first, and one spangram threading corner to corner through the grid.

Swap letters around a waffle-shaped grid to fix six words at once, with only fifteen swaps and stars for every one you save.

Six goes at one five-letter word, the same word for everybody, once a day. The puzzle that spawned an entire genre in three months.