So far, 2022 is the year of Wordle, the word puzzle sensation where you get six guesses to figure out a new five-letter word each day. The original Wordle game is free and easy to use on any mobile or desktop browser, but there’s a limit of just one puzzle per day.
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If you’ve already solved today’s Wordle, there are plenty of other word games you can play to practice for tomorrow. We've rounded up ten Wordle-adjacent games that you can play online, from the classics to new-school options with cutting-edge modes of play. Almost all of them are free, and you’ll find your verbal brain challenged in a variety of ways.
1) Word Master
First up in our list of Wordle-inspired games is Word Master, which is the same idea as Wordle, but without the one-puzzle-per-day limit. You can Wordle over and over to your heart’s content.
2) Letterle
Letterle is inspired by Wordle and has a tongue-in-cheek twist: what if you were just guessing a single letter? For a fun twist, try to guess only wrong letters for as long as possible.
3) Words With Friends
The all-time Magilla Gorilla of word games is Scrabble, and clone Words With Friends is now in its nth iteration of being just different enough to avoid a lawsuit. Play the massively popular grid game by downloading the app (available for both Android and iOS devices).
4) Scrabble GO
Speaking of Scrabble, the classic word game now has an official app (available for both Android and iOS devices) that also includes a lot of side quests and new modes of play to keep things interesting. Add friends to play against or choose random opponents.
5) Babble Royale
Babble Royale is one of the most interesting things to emerge in the word games space in a while. It’s a form of battle Scrabble where you’re dropped into a board with a number of other players, and instead of shooting or fighting, you defeat them by hooking your words into theirs. You can download the game for free for Mac or PC machines on Steam.
6) Mastermind
Wordle has mechanics inspired by games like the classic board game Mastermind, and you can play a version of that here for free. In Mastermind, you guess a sequence of colored balls and receive the same kind of feedback as in Wordle.
7) Alphabear
Alphabear and Alphabear 2 are cute mobile games where you find and spell words as a way to help boost your collection of adorable bears. In turn, the bears boost your stats and help raise your scores as you progress through the levels. You can download the app for Android or iOS devices.
8) Bookworm
Bookworm is an iconic web game from about two decades ago, but the original is still great. Spell words using adjacent tiles, but be wary of the red burning tiles—if they reach the bottom of the grid, you lose. You can play it for free online here.
9) Bananagrams
Bananagrams is a tabletop game, but you can play this version online on a desktop or laptop computer. Using a set of tiles you have in your hand, you must spell valid intersecting words.
10) The New York Times’ Spelling Bee
The New York Times’ Spelling Bee game is one of the previous years’ social media sensations, with its own customized bee hashtag and all. In the game, you have a hexagonal grid of seven letters and must spell as many words as possible, aspiring to “Genius” rank. The pinnacle is each day’s pangram, meaning a word that uses all seven letters.
Caroline Delbert is a writer, avid reader, and contributing editor at Pop Mech. She's also an enthusiast of just about everything. Her favorite topics include nuclear energy, cosmology, math of everyday things, and the philosophy of it all.
