The debate continues to rage among Wordle players: has the New York Times ruined it? Why are there suddenly so many double-letter days (SWILL, seriously?); so many frustrating solutions that hinge on a single, ambiguous letter? And what about “caulk”? Has something changed? Or are people just losing interest?
Since Wordle caught the world’s attention, there has been a fast-flowing stream of copycats and humorous takes on the word-guessing game, based on everything from swearing (Sweardle) to choral music (Byrdle) to geography (Worldle). If you’re looking for something different, though, rather than just an inventive twist on the same theme, the Android and Apple app stores have many other word games you can play on your phone. Fans have been quietly enjoying some of these for years — some offer a daily five or 10 minutes of puzzle fun, while others let you sink as much time into them as you want.
SPELLTOWER
Photo: AFP
SpellTower is an inspired combination of Boggle and Tetris, in which players make words out of adjacent letter tiles in order to clear the play space. In the puzzle mode, subsequent layers of letters are continually added until the pile reaches the top of the screen and the game ends. It’s a unique and compelling test of both your vocabulary and your spatial planning skills, and like Wordle it gets you to see words as tactical objects as well as units of language.
WURDWEB
This is a really fascinating take on Scrabble, which gives you a selection of words and then challenges you to place them on the board without running out of playable spaces. It sounds easy, but if you add too many words in one corner you can soon come adrift, and you have to make careful use of the premium squares. Scrabble fans will enjoy the way the game explores word placement strategies, and success unlocks the more demanding “precise mode,” which requires players to finish on a specific square. Not for the faint-hearted.
BABA IS YOU
As much a logic game as a word game, this endearingly lo-fi puzzler has you shifting words around to change the rules. Unshiftable boulders can be pushed aside if you create the sentence ROCK IS MOVE; if there’s a key hidden down a maze, try KEY IS YOU and you can possess it and move it somewhere more accessible. It will outsmart you, but it will also make you feel like a genius when you crack it.
LETTER QUEST: GRIMM’S JOURNEY
A kind of slightly violent Scrabble, in Letter Quest, you guide a cute little grim reaper through dungeons full of monsters, defeating them by conjuring impressive words from a panel of letter tiles. Any word will do damage, but the fun comes from figuring out particularly appropriate or long ones; there’s nothing quite as satisfying as defeating a werewolf with “silver.” It’s a lovely combination of word puzzles and old-school dungeon-delving adventure. Anyone who played the fondly remembered Bookworm Adventures, sadly now scrubbed from existence, will especially enjoy this.
KITTY LETTER
In this gently bizarre, free game, you unscramble words from a hexagonal grid of letters to send little armies of exploding cats towards your opponent’s house. It’s quite frantic, rather than contemplative, and more fun against a friend (or a stranger) online, but there’s a single-player mode too, featuring surreal interactive comics.
TYPESHIFT
This is not unlike Wordle — there’s a word that the game wants you to guess, and you have to puzzle it out — but this gives you a slot machine wheel of different letters, and you spin each column around with your finger until something makes sense. It also has a mode where you have to figure out several words from crossword-style clues, working with what you’re given. There’s something very satisfying about the tactile nature of Typeshift, like playing with a padlock combination made of letters.
ALPHABEAR: WORDS ACROSS TIME
This is much cuter and weirder than anything you’ll find in a newspaper puzzle app — it features little collectible square-headed bears, and making longer, better words out of the letter grid in front of you creates more, bigger bears. It pairs word-building with the human appetite for collecting things. The words you’ve spelled then get made into absurd cartoons after every round. It’s very funny and adorable, and appealing enough to draw kids into some spelling-related fun.
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