daily fiction games
Six games that score meaning instead of spelling, checked and working in July 2026.
Semantle started this genre in January 2022: guess the secret word and be told not whether your letters match, but how close your word sits in meaning. Contexto took the same idea mainstream with friendlier ranks. Both are still running, both are below, and so is every living sibling we could verify, because if you have found one of these games you will want the others.
The rest of the daily-games world, letters and all, lives in games like Wordle.
Same idea, opposite temperaments.
The original, by David Turner: a similarity score out of one hundred, computed by word2vec, unlimited guesses, and a FAQ that warns you will probably need dozens. Merciless in the early game, when everything scores in the teens and you are guessing into fog. A team mode lets a group chip away at the same word, and a Junior mode softens the landing.
The friendlier one: every guess gets a rank rather than a raw score, so you always know roughly how deep in the queue you sit, and rank one is the answer. Unlimited guesses, a back catalogue that stays open, and versions in several languages.
The living siblings, from a thermometer to an entire redacted encyclopaedia.
The English edition of the French hit Cémantix: each guess returns a temperature, and once you are inside the thousand nearest words a progress bar starts filling. The daily counter passed 1,500 puzzles this year, and its share cards full of thermometer emoji are a genre in themselves.
Semantle with the fog lifted a little: your guesses are plotted on a map of meaning, so instead of a bare number you can see which semantic neighbourhood you are circling and steer by it. Same daily-word bones underneath.
From the same stable as Cemantle: a whole Wikipedia page with its words hidden, revealed as your guesses land, until you can name the article’s subject. The semantic engine decides how close each guess is, so vocabulary and general knowledge both carry you.
Guess the subject of a Wikipedia article redacted down to its prepositions, drawn from the encyclopaedia’s 10,000 vital articles. The 2022 original by John Turner is gone; redactle.net carries the game on with a daily at 16:00 UTC, an unlimited mode, multiplayer and a junior edition.
Every game above was checked by hand in July 2026 and linked at its verified home, including where a genre original has died and a successor carries the name. Descriptions describe; nothing here is ranked.