daily fiction games
Nine spinoffs that keep the grid and change one rule, checked and working in July 2026.
In 2022, Wordle’s formula got forked hundreds of times: same coloured tiles, same six-guess shape, one dial turned. Most of those forks are dead. The nine below are the ones still running a daily puzzle, each one changing a different rule, and every link goes to the verified original rather than the clone farms that have grown around each name.
This page is the family tree only. Our full map of everything worth playing, variants and far beyond, is the games like Wordle roundup.
The arms race started with Dordle doubling the board in early 2022, and the escalation never really stopped.
Four hidden words, one shared stream of guesses, nine tries. Every word you type lands on all four boards at once, so a guess that helps one grid can waste a turn on another. Built by Freddie Meyer in 2022, bought by Merriam-Webster in 2023, with sequence and practice modes alongside the daily.
Eight boards and thirteen guesses. The information problem gets genuinely hard: early guesses have to serve eight puzzles at once. Now published by Britannica, with a sequence mode that deals the boards one at a time.
The logical endpoint: thirty-two boards, thirty-seven guesses, every guess applied to all of them. Built by Bryan Chen as a joke among friends that got out of hand; it now has optional accounts, a global daily leaderboard and a practice mode.
Same tiles, same colours, entirely different job.
The adversarial one. There is no fixed secret word: Absurdle keeps every word consistent with your guesses alive and shows you the least helpful colouring it legally can, until you corner it into a single answer. Unlimited guesses, and the challenge is doing it in few.
Wordle inverted: avoid the hidden word for as long as you can. Letters you hit become compulsory in every later guess, so the game slowly walls you in, and your score is how many guesses you survive before it forces the answer out of you.
No guessing at all: every letter is already on the board, scrambled across six intersecting words in a waffle-shaped grid. You get fifteen swaps, every board is solvable in ten, and the spares are your star rating. New waffle at midnight GMT, or midnight local if you set it.
Waffle’s idea scaled up to a crossword: a seven-by-seven grid of intersecting words, all letters visible but scrambled, a limited budget of swaps, and colour clues telling you which word each letter belongs to. A nine-by-nine daily, unlimited practice and an archive sit alongside the main puzzle.
The grid survives the removal of the alphabet.
The hidden answer is an eight-character calculation, equals sign included, and you get six guesses with the familiar colour feedback. Every guess must be arithmetically true, which is the real constraint. Created by a father and daughter in 2022; a whole nerdleverse of official variants hangs off it.
Turn the dial far enough and the word disappears altogether. Games like Globle has the full geography branch.
The variant that founded a genre: a country’s silhouette instead of a word, six guesses, and each miss answered with the distance and compass direction to the target. Bonus rounds on the flag and capital follow a solve.
Every variant above was checked by hand in July 2026, loaded and confirmed running, and linked at its original home. Names you might miss from older lists (Dordle’s original, Hello Wordl and others) are absent because we could not verify them working, and a list is only useful if every link on it opens a live game.
We make two daily fiction games ourselves, Forgery and Escape (or die). They are not Wordle variants, so they are not on this list; they live at the front door instead.