Ask HN: What are your favourite daily puzzle games?
I got hooked on daily puzzle games like a lot of people, with Wordle and since then have been collecting them here and there. Most of my faves have been posted here by creators or fans, others I don't remember how I found them. Anyway, it's been a while since we've had a dedicated thread for people to share their favourites, but there are new ones coming out all the time, so I'm curious to know if there are any good ones I'm missing out on. I guess my only real criteria are that they are browser-based, mobile friendly, free to play and somewhat original. Below are the ones I regularly play:
From the NYT: Wordle, connections and the mini
https://wordchase.semantle.com guess the word guided by AI hints
https://travle.earth/ get from one country to another by passing through bordering countries
https://wafflegame.net/ drag and drop letters to make a "waffle" of words
https://imsqueezy.com/ insert letters to make other words, to form 3 words connected by a theme
https://truncate.town/ kind of an adversarial scrabble, PvP or against the computer
https://ziggurwords.com/ unscramble letters to find increasingly longer words
https://crosswordle.com/ a crossword/wordle hybrid
https://www.threemagicwords.app/ more word unscrambling
https://www.theatlantic.com/games/bracket-city/ hard to explain - uncover a famous event in history by unwrapping nested clues?
https://www.omiword.com/ drag tiles within sectors to spell 4 common words
Am I missing any good ones?
I enjoy good puzzle games, but I really dislike the trend towards "daily" games. Whenever I find one, I look for whatever option they have for randomly generated "practice" games (ignoring the "daily" puzzle), and if they don't have one, abandon the game entirely. I can understand that people enjoy comparing their results on a particular game, but to me, that's much less interesting than being able to actually play the game for more than five minutes.
The latest small browser-based puzzle game I've enjoyed: https://danielben.itch.io/dragonsweeper
Fair enough. I would guess that daily games prevent me from bingeing and getting bored. The exception would be https://truncate.town/ - something about that game really clicks with me and I often play a "regular" (non-daily) game against the computer when I have a spare few minutes
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/ - guess the country
https://timeguessr.com/ - guess a photo's year and location
So not daily but maybe three days or so if I need to put the mind into neutral I do something repetitive [1] there are other puzzles at the site as well that are bit more challenging eg [2]
[1] https://www.mathsisfun.com/games/towerofhanoi.html
[2] https://www.mathsisfun.com/games/arrange.html
Someone posted a daily logic puzzle in the "What are you working on?" thread yesterday, titled Clues by Sam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43821457
I enjoyed it! Not too difficult but still required some thinking.
Lichess.org has great chess puzzzles. I like that you get a puzzle rating and have metric to track cognitive decline.
I like NYT Strands. It's a word search where you're given a theme, but not the specific words you need to find.
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