The word shelf here holds hundreds of daily games, and a good share of them are close copies of one five-letter puzzle. This page keeps a shorter list and sorts it by what each game gives you: the familiar format with a twist, more boards at once, a puzzle about meaning instead of spelling, letters to build words from, or a single clue you can finish in a few minutes.
If you want variety, take one from each group rather than three from the same one. Every pick is free in a browser and lets you play the day's puzzle without signing in.
Colored tiles after every guess are the starting point. The two games after Wordle keep the guessing but change what the feedback tells you, and the Wordle alternatives list has many more.
Six guesses at one hidden five-letter word. Green marks a letter in the right place, yellow a letter that belongs elsewhere, gray a letter that is absent. The NYT releases it at midnight in your own time zone, and logging in to a New York Times account keeps your stats on every device.
Plays like Wordle except that every row of feedback contains one false color, and the game never says which. Working out which tile is lying becomes half the puzzle, so it suits players who find the original too easy. An archive and an unlimited mode come with it.
Drops the colors altogether. The secret word sits in an alphabetical list, every guess becomes a new upper or lower bound, and a marker shows which bound the answer is nearer to. You have twelve tries to squeeze it out, and a new word arrives at your midnight.
One keyboard feeds every board, so each guess has to earn its keep in several places at once. The multi-board list goes all the way up to 64 boards.
Two boards side by side, one keyboard and seven tries. A single word can be a near miss on the left and a strong lead on the right, which makes it a mild introduction to playing more than one board. It saves your game as you go and keeps stats and streaks.
Thirty-two boards and 37 guesses: a long session of careful bookkeeping rather than a quick solve. Hints you can switch off show which columns are already settled, and extra daily modes such as Sequence and Jumble change how the boards open. For players who want a marathon.
These care what words mean and how they go together, not how they are spelled.
Sort sixteen words into four groups of four with four mistakes to spare. The NYT says each puzzle has exactly one solution, yet its words are picked to fit more than one group, so patience beats speed. The color of each solved group shows how hard it was, from yellow up to purple.
Type any word and it gets a place in a ranking of how close it is to the secret word, judged by how words are used together in text. Guesses are unlimited and you win when one reaches number one. A hint is a menu tap away, and past games go back to launch day.
Scores every guess by closeness in meaning, using a model called word2vec, and shows a rank once you are among the nearest thousand words. Spelling never counts. A new game comes out each evening at 8:00 p.m. New York time, and earlier games stay free in an archive.
Hank Green's grouping puzzle with a twist: nine words, four categories of three, and one word that belongs to all four. Find that shared word and the rest of the board falls into place. A smaller board than Connections, with every earlier day kept in an archive.
The letters are already on the board. The work is finding what they spell, or moving them to where they belong.
A themed word search on a board of six by eight letters. Theme words wind through touching letters, one spangram stretches from side to side, and every letter is used exactly once. Spotting other words along the way earns hints: every three of them unlock one.
Twenty-one scrambled letters sit on a lattice of six crossing words, three across and three down, and you swap pairs of tiles until all six are spelled right. You have fifteen swaps, every puzzle can be solved in ten, and each spare swap becomes a star.
From The Guardian: you get a short starter word and five attempts to find the longest real word with the starter inside it. Two scores come back, one for how close your longest word gets to the longest possible answer and one for every letter you used, so each attempt adds something.
Small puzzles for a short break, each solved in one go.
One cryptic crossword clue a day, with the answer length shown and a hint button for when you stall. Three free courses explain how cryptic clues are built, which makes it the friendliest way in for anyone who has found cryptics baffling.
Get from the top word to the bottom word in steps, swapping a single letter per move and using only real words. The results set your number of moves beside the shortest route and show one way to do it. Daily ladders come in four and five letters, with an unlimited mode for more.
Every game on this page is listed on Today's Dailies, so it is free, plays in a web browser and needs no account for its daily puzzle. Links are checked every night, and reset times come only from a game's own site or countdown. Picks are grouped by what each game does well rather than ranked, with a few in each group so the page stays short. All 14 picks were opened in a phone-sized browser between November 4 and November 5, 2026 and loaded, and each one fit the screen without sideways scrolling.
Wordle asks you to find one hidden five-letter word in six guesses, using colored tiles as feedback. Connections gives you sixteen words to sort into four groups of four that share a link, with four mistakes allowed. Both are New York Times games, and both bring a new puzzle at midnight in your own time zone.
Contexto and Semantle let you keep guessing until you find the word; they count your guesses rather than capping them. The multi-board games are the opposite: every guess counts on all boards, but the number is fixed, seven for Dordle and 37 for Duotrigordle.
Plenty. Contexto and Semantle are about meaning, Strands is a themed word search, Waffle has you swap letters into six crossing words, Wordiply asks for the longest word around a starter, and Minute Cryptic is a single cryptic clue.
