The Best Wordle Spin-offs You Should Play on Your Phone
There are two types of people in this world: those who recognize Wordle grids of yellow, green, and grey-black blocks, and those who don’t. No matter which category you fall into, there’s a Wordle-inspired game for you.
The viral success of Wordle, a daily five-letter word guessing game, not only led to corporate takeovers, but spawned spin-offs of varying degrees of sophistication and enjoyment. There’s something for everyone, from thematic twists on the word puzzle format to multimedia entertainment played out in six moves.
Some of the best additional Wordle products are listed below for you to incorporate into your daily routine. Only one of the games has apps for Android and iOS, but you can easily bookmark any of the web apps on the home screen for faster access. Some of them can even be installed on your home screen as offline games.
1. Antiword
This one could also be called Bizarro Wordle because it’s essentially the exact opposite in premise. Instead of trying to guess the daily word in six tries or less, your goal is to try and get as many incorrect guesses as possible until you’re forced to type in the correct five-digit word.
Like Wordle, Antiwordle colors a block yellow when that letter is in a word, but uses red instead of green to indicate a correctly placed letter. What makes it so tricky is that all of your subsequent guesses must include those letters, and cannot include those marked excluded (shaded).
The red tiles must be in the same place on future guesses, and you can use the yellow tile letters in the same place as many times as you like. However, you can turn on the “Hard Mode”setting, which will force you to put the letter marked in yellow in different positions on future guesses.
- Play Antiwordle: Web (Free)
2. Ludl
Created by video game journalist and screenwriter Gary Whitta , whose credits include Star Wars Rebels, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. ” is limited to dirty words and euphemisms, and sometimes six-letter puzzles.
It’s harder to guess only swear words, so Ludle has a few auxiliary tools. Just Tip shows you one letter per round if you need it, Ghost Guess lets you write a five-letter word instead, and Sheltered Mode allows non-obscene English words next to the obscene “dictionary”. All helpers add a penalty to your obscenity. As a bonus after the game, you will receive a definition of the word and a funny sample sentence.
Lewdle started out as a web app but moved to an Android/iOS mobile app. After the move, Lludle also transitioned from a daily game to a non-stop mode.
Since this is a family site, I didn’t use my usual initial six letter word.
3. Hurdle
Heardle is essentially a variation of Wordle on the classic “Name That Tune”vanity. Press the play button to listen to a one-second snippet of the song’s intro. Start typing to find the artist and title, then submit your guess. A wrong guess or omission reveals more of the intro, giving you a longer clip to make another guess.
For music lovers, it may be easier (and perhaps more enjoyable) to win on the first guess than Wordle. But if you don’t listen to much of what’s popular these days, you may be puzzled until the very end.
After each game, you can listen to the song on Spotify, which purchased Heardle from its independent developer in July 2022.
- Play Heardle: Web (Free)
4. Framed
Although it does not use the -le suffix like the others in the list, it does follow the general format. You start with a random frame from a movie. Start typing to narrow down the library of game titles to your chosen guess. Each incorrect guess or omission of the film opens up a new frame, where key actors and scenes are revealed in each frame, gradually making it easier to understand.
If you like Framed, you can also try the weekly TV Show Episode, which gives you ten guesses to identify the TV show from the pictures. Web developer Frames and Episode also has Plotwords, where you guess the title of a movie from words associated with the movie, and Numble, where you build mathematical equations from given numbers and operators to reach the target solution.
- Play Framed: Web (Free)
5. World
If you excel in geography more than spelling, Worldle is the game for you. Just don’t try to say “Worldle”out loud.
Every day, Worldle shows you a silhouette of a country or territory that you need to identify in six tries or less. Each guess is scored with a percentage based on its proximity to the answer, and it gives you direction and distance hints to help you get closer with each future guess. You can switch units in the settings if you prefer miles to kilometers for measuring distance.
When the game is over, you can view the country on Google Maps, learn more about the location from Wikipedia, and advance to the bonus round where you guess the country’s neighbors.
If Worldle seems too simple for you, you can make it more complex in the settings. One replaces the proximity percentage with a size percentage, and the other hides the country image. The third randomly rotates the silhouette of the country throughout the game. If you change any of these settings, it will not apply until the next game.
- Play Worldle: Web (Free)
6. Foodl
Phoodle is Wordle for food! Responses may include dishes, flavors, famous chefs, kitchen appliances, and other culinary and gourmet-related words, not just actual product names.
As with Wordle, you have six attempts to guess the five-letter term, and the tile color scheme is the same as grey/yellow/green. You can also track your historical results with the key pie chart and use the chef hat button to get a fun fact about the answer.
- Play Phoodle: Web (Free)
7.CFBordle
This is a College Football Wordle created by the popular Reddit subreddit r/cfb. Correct answers may include sports mascots, school nicknames, etc.
Like Wordle and its many offshoots, you have a maximum of six attempts to guess a five-letter term, and the tile color scheme is the same as grey/yellow/green. If you find the game too easy, try switching to hard mode with the birthday cake button.
Even though I’m a college football fan, I’m awfully bad at the game.
- Play CFBordle: Web (Free)
8. Emoji
Like Framed, Emovi is a guessing game for cinephiles; only it’s made by the same developer as the geography-focused Worldle. Instead of movie frames, Emovi rewrites movie titles with emoji characters and prompts you to decipher them. You only have three attempts to guess the correct movie, but hints are available after each failed guess or missed turn.
Emovi also allows you to submit your own emoji interpretations of random movies. If you don’t want to try to encode emoji in one movie, you can choose another random movie.
- Play Emoji: Online (Free)
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