Games like Wordle: the best daily -dle games to play in 2026
Wordle proved that a single shared puzzle a day, with a shareable result, is a format people will come back to for years. Hundreds of games have borrowed it since — the "-dle" suffix became a genre. Most are forgettable clones; a few dozen are genuinely good and have kept a daily audience. This guide is the shortlist: what each game asks you to do, what makes it different, and a link to play. Games we host ourselves are marked; the rest link out to the original site.
Word games
- Wordle (The New York Times) — the original. Six guesses at a five-letter word. Still the best-designed of the lot. Our guide →
- Quordle (Merriam-Webster) — four Wordles at once, solved with the same nine guesses. Each guess is scored against all four boards, so you are always thinking about the boards you are not focused on. Play ↗
- Octordle — the same idea with eight boards and thirteen guesses. For people who found Quordle relaxing. Play ↗
- Absurdle — an adversarial Wordle that changes the secret word to whichever one keeps you furthest from solving. Unlimited guesses; the game is finding the strategy that pins it down. Play ↗
- Waffle — six words laid out in a waffle grid, already filled with the right letters in the wrong places. You have fifteen swaps to fix it; a perfect game uses exactly ten. Play ↗
- Contexto and Semantle — guess the secret word by meaning. Each guess is ranked by how semantically close it is (using word embeddings). No letters, no length; just "warmer" and "colder" in vocabulary space. Expect to take dozens of guesses.
- Connections (The New York Times) — sixteen words, four hidden groups of four. Not a Wordle clone mechanically, but it lives in the same daily-ritual slot for millions of people. Play ↗
Geography games
- Worldle — name the country from its silhouette, with distance and direction hints. Six guesses. Our guide →
- Globle — find the country by heat: every guess is coloured on a globe by how close it is. Unlimited guesses. Our guide →
- Flagle — the flag is revealed in pieces as you guess. Good for learning flags without noticing you are learning. Play ↗
- Tradle — guess the country from a treemap of its exports (built on the Observatory of Economic Complexity data). Surprisingly educational: you learn what places actually make. Play ↗
- Travle — get from country A to country B by naming the countries in between, in as few steps as possible. Play ↗
Number and maths games
- Nerdle — guess the hidden eight-character equation. Green, purple and black tiles instead of green, yellow and grey. Our guide →
- Mathler — you are told the answer (say, 24) and must find the calculation that produces it. Wordle logic, reversed. Play ↗
- Primel — Wordle with five-digit prime numbers. Every guess must be prime, which is most of the difficulty. Play ↗
- RNGdle — the odd one out: you do not guess anything. One roll a day gives you a random number, and the game scans it for patterns — palindromes, primes, meme numbers, mathematical sequences — awarding badges and points by how rare they are. It is a daily lottery ticket with a leaderboard. Play on dlegame →
Music, film and sport
- Framed — guess the movie from a single frame; each wrong guess reveals another frame. Six frames total. Play ↗
- Heardle — the original guess-the-song-from-its-intro game was bought by Spotify in 2022 and shut down in 2023. Several fan versions exist under similar names; the experience varies, and none is the original.
- Poeltl — Wordle for NBA players: guess the mystery player from team, conference, position, height, age and jersey-number hints. Play ↗
How to pick a daily rotation
The genre works because it is small. One puzzle, a few minutes, done. The mistake is to add ten games and burn out in a week. A rotation that lasts is usually one word game, one geography game and one wildcard — something with a different rhythm, like Contexto's slow burn or RNGdle's instant roll.
Every game on this page resets once a day (mostly at midnight local time; a few at midnight UTC), so a rotation of three takes about ten minutes a day and gives you three results to share.
Frequently asked questions
Why are they all called something-dle?
Wordle's name is a pun on its creator's surname (Josh Wardle). When the format was copied, keeping the "-dle" ending became the way to signal "this is a daily puzzle in the Wordle style". It stuck, and now it names the whole genre.
Are these games free?
Everything listed here is free to play in a browser. Some (Wordle, Connections) sit inside a larger site with paid games alongside them, but the games themselves are free.
Can I play more than one puzzle a day?
Not the daily puzzle itself — that is the point of the format. Some games offer unlimited or archive modes separately; RNGdle does not, by design: one roll, no rerolls.