Daily games like Wordle.

The short answer

The best-known daily games like Wordle are the New York Times' Connections, Strands and Spelling Bee, along with Quordle, Waffle, Nerdle and Worldle. Each one sets a new puzzle every day, the same for every player, so you can compare notes with friends.

Sorted by what they test, the word games are Connections, Strands, Spelling Bee, Quordle, Octordle and Waffle. Nerdle and the Times' Pips trade letters for numbers and logic. Worldle, Globle and Travle test your map knowledge, Framed and Bandle cover film and music, and Thrice is a daily trivia quiz from a pub quiz company. For food, Meridish, the game behind this site, asks where a dish was born. Wordle itself is still free: the New York Times bought it in January 2022 and lists it among the games you can play without a subscription.

The 14 games at a glance

Word games

In Connections you get 16 words and sort them into four groups of four that share a link, and four wrong guesses end the game. Each group carries a colour for its difficulty, from yellow for the easiest to purple for the hardest. Wyna Liu, a crossword editor at the Times, writes the puzzles. Her links often turn on wordplay, such as homophones or palindromes, and she plants red herrings to throw you. Connections opened in beta in June 2023, and by the end of that summer the Times called it its second-most-played game after Wordle. The Athletic launched a Sports Edition in February 2025.

Strands is a themed word search. Letters fill a grid six wide and eight tall, and you trace words of four letters or more through it, bending in any direction. One answer, the spangram, describes the theme and stretches between two opposite edges of the grid. The answers never overlap, and every letter belongs to one of them. If you get stuck, find three words outside the theme and you earn a hint that lights up one answer. Tracy Bennett, who also edits Wordle, edits Strands.

Spelling Bee gives you seven letters in a honeycomb and asks for as many words as you can make from them. Each word needs four letters or more and must use the letter in the centre, and you can use any letter more than once. A pangram, a word with all seven letters, scores a bonus. The ranks climb to Genius, and finding every word makes you Queen Bee. Its editor, Sam Ezersky, leaves the letter S out of almost every puzzle so plurals can't pad your score. Of the Times games here, Spelling Bee alone limits non-subscribers: you get a few words free, and the rest of the puzzle needs a Games subscription.

Quordle runs four Wordles at once. Every guess you type goes into all four grids, and you have nine guesses to solve the lot. Freddie Meyer released it in February 2022, and Merriam-Webster, the dictionary publisher, bought it in January 2023. You can play it free on Merriam-Webster's site, with a practice mode for extra rounds. Octordle raises the count to eight words in 13 guesses, and it now lives on Merriam-Webster's site too.

Waffle shows a grid of words that read across and down, with their letters scrambled. You swap letters two at a time until every word reads as it should, and colours tell you which letters sit in the right place. You have 15 swaps, you can solve every puzzle in 10, and each swap you have left over earns a star. Everyone gets the new Waffle at midnight GMT. Waffle Studio, a UK team, makes it, and adds a weekly Deluxe Waffle and a Number Waffle on the same site.

Numbers and logic

Nerdle puts sums in place of words. The answer is an eight-character equation, such as 10+20=30, and each guess has to be a correct calculation in its own right. A green tile means the right character in the right place, and purple means the right character in the wrong place. Richard Mann, a London data scientist, came up with Nerdle on a drive home with his 14-year-old daughter in January 2022, and his family still owns and runs it. It's free in any browser. Mini nerdle uses six characters if you want a shorter puzzle, and maxi nerdle uses ten.

Pips is the New York Times' logic game, launched in August 2025. You place dominoes on a board so their pips meet the conditions the board sets, and you get three puzzles a day, rising from easy to hard. It sits on the Times' list of games you can play without a subscription.

Maps and geography

Worldle shows you the outline of a country or territory and gives you six guesses to name it. After each miss you see how far away your guess is, an arrow pointing toward the answer and a closeness percentage. Antoine Teuf, a French web developer, created it, and the company Teuteuf runs it today. The daily game is free, and a paid Premium plan opens the archive of past puzzles.

Globle hides a country and lets you guess as many times as you need. Each guess appears on a globe, shaded darker the closer it sits to the answer. Trainwreck Labs makes Globle and keeps it free with ads; a paid Trainwreck Club membership removes them. Travle, another Teuteuf game, names two countries and asks you to join them through the countries in between. The guide to daily geography games covers all three in more depth.

Film and music

Framed tests how well you know films. The classic game shows you one frame from a film and gives you six guesses, and each wrong guess reveals another frame. Newer modes ask you to name the film from a single frame, its title shot or its poster, and an archive lets you catch up on days you missed. Framed is free to play, and the site sells merch to support itself.

Heardle was the music game of the Wordle boom. You heard the opening of a song in snippets that grew from 1 second to 16, and you had six tries to name it. Omakase Studios in London launched it in February 2022 and sold it to Spotify that July. Spotify shut Heardle down on 5 May 2023 to focus on other music discovery features. Fan-made clones such as Heardle Decades copied the format with their own song lists.

Bandle is the music game to try now. It plays a song one instrument at a time, starting with the drums, and you can guess each time a new part comes in. If you still haven't named it by the time the vocals arrive, you get a text clue. Johann Levy, who is based in France, made it in 2022. The app is free and sells packs of extra songs.

Trivia

Thrice comes from Geeks Who Drink, a pub quiz company founded in 2006, and launched in December 2023. Each day you get five questions from five categories, and each question comes with three clues that all point to the same answer. Get it on the first clue for 3 points, the second for 2 or the third for 1, for a top score of 15. A wrong answer counts as a pass and moves you on to the next clue. Thrice runs in your browser with nothing to download, and you can share your score once you finish.

Food

Meridish brings the daily format to food geography. Every day everyone gets the same seven-course tasting menu, from an aperitif through street food, a starter, a soup, a rice or noodle dish and a main to a dessert. For each dish you read a clue and tap the map where you think it was born. The answer is a town or city, and the clue never names the place.

You score up to 100 points a course, the full 100 for landing within 25 km, and 700 for the whole menu. After each course you see the share of players you finished closer than, along with everyone else's average distance. You share your result as a spoiler-free emoji line, the way Wordle does. A menu takes about three minutes, it's free in your browser, and a new one arrives every day at midnight UTC. The how to play page sets out the scoring in full, or you can play today's menu.

Which one to play

If you already play Wordle in the Times' app, Connections and Strands sit in the same app and cost nothing, so start there. A word game and a map game make a good pair, since one draws on vocabulary and the other on geography. Meridish fits next to any of them. Its seven dishes ask for towns and cities on a map, a finer answer than the country games ask for.

Questions

Sources

1. The New York Times Help Center, New York Times Games subscription: the games you can play free, and what needs a subscription.
2. NYT Games on the App Store.
3. Wikipedia, Wordle, and The New York Times Games.
4. Wikipedia, The New York Times Connections, and TechCrunch, Connections is The New York Times' most played game after Wordle.
5. Wikipedia, The New York Times Strands, and The New York Times Spelling Bee.
6. TechCrunch, Wordle clone Quordle acquired by Merriam-Webster; Wikipedia, Quordle; Beebom, How to play Quordle.
7. Merriam-Webster, Octordle, and TechWiser, Octordle answers today.
8. Waffle, the game.
9. Nerdle, Classic nerdle and The story of nerdle.
10. Worldle, FAQ; Travle, extra info on puzzles and scoring; Teuteuf Games.
11. Beebom, How to play Globle, and hey.gg, The game that puts the "world" in worldwide: Globle.
12. Framed, the game and instructions, and What to Watch, Framed: the new game that's Wordle but for movie fans.
13. Wikipedia, Heardle, and TechCrunch, Spotify is shutting down Heardle.
14. NBC News, Is Bandle the new Wordle?, and Bandle on the App Store.
15. Geeks Who Drink, Bite-size fun for everyone, Newswire, Geeks Who Drink's new daily game, and Thrice.