Image: Rocketship Park
Word games on mobile and PC
OK, so now you know what Wordle is. You love it, even. But you can play it only once per day. There is a tweaked version of the game called hello wordl that lets you play endlessly (which I’ve detailed at the bottom of this list), but Wordle’s charm is in the excitement of waking up every day to a new word — not to mention the joy of bragging about your score on social media.
These games don’t mimic the social sharing part of Wordle that’s become popular on Twitter and in group chats, but they will scratch that word-solving itch, or create a similar feeling with numbers. These games can be played on a range of platforms, from in-browser to PC and mobile apps.
Kitty Letter
Kitty Letter, from the creator of Exploding Kittens, is a word unscrambling game, where your words turn into cats that defend your home from a second player. That’s neat, because it means you can play it with friends. But there’s a single-player mode stuffed with The Oatmeal comics, too.
Kitty Letter is free on the iOS App Store and Google Play.
Babble Royale
From developer Everybody House Games, Babble Royale is like Scrabble if it were a battle royale video game. Basically, the idea is this: Connecting to other players’ Scrabble words knocks them out, and only one player out of 16 can win.
Babble Royale is free to play via Steam.
Murder by Numbers
Murder by Numbers is not a word game at all. As you may have guessed, it’s a game with numbers. Part visual novel and part puzzle game, Murder by Numbers will feel familiar to anyone who’s played Picross. The puzzles just feel satisfying, just like a hard round of Wordle.
SpellTower
SpellTower and SpellTower+ are word games by Zach Gage. The original, SpellTower, has been a hit since it was released in 2008, but the upgraded version, SpellTower+ was added with Apple Arcade.
Here’s how it works: In the classic mode, players have to unscramble words from a tangled mess of letters, but with each found word, more letters get added to the bottom of the screen — without strategy, it’s easy for the tower to get too tall. And that means game over.
There are a few different modes that adapt the game for different ways to play — against other players, expert modes, or a zen mode.
SpellTower+ is available as part of Apple Arcade, while SpellTower is available on Google Play and the App Store.
Word Forward
Rocketship Park’s Word Forward is a wordl-based brain teasing puzzle that looks pretty similar to a filled up Wordle board. Here, like in the other games, you have to unscramble words, but Word Forward has a few extra tools to make things fresh, swapping letters and destroying tiles.
Word Forward is available for $2.99 on itch.io and Google Play, $4.99 on Steam, and $3.99 on the App Store.
hello wordl
Image: @chordbug/Twitter
This one’s easy to describe. hello wordl is a remake of Wordle, and has the same rules: You have six tries to guess the word, slowly deducing what it is from the given clues. The major difference here is that hello wordl lets you play as many times per day as you want, and you can play with words ranging from four letters to 11.
hello wordl is free in browsers.
