With the meteoric rise of Wordle, it stands to reason that they’d be a bunch of similar experiences trying to emulate the quirky word puzzle’s success. So how do you know which ones are worth your time? Here’s a list of some of the best games like Wordle.
Quordle
Have you found yourself thinking that Wordle is just a touch too easy now that you’ve played it every day for the last year? Turns out, there are plenty of options if you want to make the actual puzzles themselves a little more challenging. Quordle is one of my favorites, given that it’s effectively solving four puzzles at once, as the name would suggest. Functionally, it’s identical to Wordle, but this instance of the game has guesses spanning across four different boards.
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To compensate for the extra challenge, you’ll have nine options to correctly guess all four words, and while that may not sound like enough, you’d be surprised at how much more you can accomplish with three extra guesses. It’s a challenge of spinning planets, ensuring you don’t zero in on one word while neglecting all the others. It’s exactly the kind of “hard mode” that’ll satisfy language nerds and Wordle aficionados.
Murdle
This one is for fans of a good old-fashioned whodunnit, and it’s probably my personal favorite game inspired by Wordle. Murdle is a series of daily murder mystery puzzles that task players with solving some especially tricky crimes. Each puzzle is unique in the information provided; suspects will change, clues are adjusted, and the solution is never as straightforward as you might think. It’s all exceptionally curated and polished, with every challenge feeling fresh.
Seriously, the amount of effort that’s gone into making each of the puzzles special is exceptional. Designer G.T. Karber is clearly an expert in the field of conundrums, and while many of the crimes are difficult to piece together, the solution always makes sense once you’ve cracked. If you don’t, it’s tough to feel cheated when all the necessary information is right in front of you. Murdle has proven to be so popular that it’s even available as a physical book loaded with puzzles!
Worldle
Maybe words aren’t quite your thing. Perhaps you spent most of your youth pouring over maps and then, during your gap year, embarked on several expeditions to different lands far and wide. If that’s the case, then Worldle might be what appeals most to you. Conceptually identical to Wordle, players are granted six tries to guess a single country based on nothing more than the shape of its silhouette. That may sound simple enough, but it turns out most folks aren’t great when it comes to global geography.
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To make matters somewhat easier and help guide your speculations, Worldle provides a proximity percentage that indicates how close your guessed country is to the solution. Not only that, there’s a little arrow that represents cardinal directions to help shift your direction the right way. It’s far more helpful than you may expect, but it likely won’t be enough to save your game if your knowledge of the Middle East and the surrounding territories isn’t up to snuff.
Framed
So words and geography aren’t your specialty, huh? While the rest of the class was studying Shakespeare and the atlas, you spent most of your time watching movies on your phone. If that’s accurate, then you should check out Framed. Once again lifting the concept of Wordle, this game applies its shots from movies. I’m talking about ALL movies, not just the Hollywood blockbusters you see playing on TV every weekend.
With each incorrect guess, you’ll receive a new, slightly more obvious image to help you guess the solution. It’s not exactly complicated, nor is it innovative, but for cinephiles, it’s incredibly satisfying to correctly guess an obscure from the 1970s that you just KNOW no one else has seen.
SpellTower
SpellTower won’t be your game if the guessing component of Wordle is what brings you back every day, but if the idea of making words under pressure lights a fire in your soul, then you’re in luck. Effectively a mixture between a word search puzzle and Tetris, SpellTower prompts players to make as many words as possible while a rising stack of letters continues to rise. If it gets too high, you lose, but you can bring it down a few levels by finding and spelling out words. The longer, the better!
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While that may sound stressful, the game itself sports a wonderfully quirky aesthetic to remind players that it’s all just a bit of fun and that they needn’t take it all so seriously. The best part about SpellTower is that it’s included in Apple Arcade, so if you have a subscription to the service, then you can pick it up for free! Well, not for FREE, but you know what I mean.
Baba Is You
Okay, hear me out on this one. I understand that this is very clearly a major deviation from Wordle, but when it comes to appealing to a language lover’s sense of fun, I doubt you’d find much better than Baba Is You. This fiendishly challenging game is less about guessing words and more about manipulating them to make meaning. It’s a puzzle of semantics, forcing players to manipulate various objects in a level in order to create their own solutions.
It starts off fairly easy with a tutorial that teaches you the basics, and right when you feel like you’ve got a grasp on the mechanics, Baba Is You ratchets up the difficulty in a way that’ll have you asking your parents for help. Yet, it never strays into the realm of frustration. Once the answer becomes clear, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be left with the irritating thought of, “How was I meant to know that?” Instead, you’ll smile at seeing a clever puzzle reveal all its secrets. There’s nothing quite like Baba Is You.
