We’ve all witnessed the rise of NYT games in recent years, and I’m sure that a lot of you play them regularly (as do I). However, there are only so many games, especially if you don’t have an account, so I thought I would offer some of my favorite online games in the same vein that offer new challenges daily, if you’ve already exhausted your options and are still looking for something to play.
(Fair warning, a lot of these—not all of them, but several—are going to be geography-related. I honestly don’t know why, but just trust me that they are still fun. You can build up your geography skills one game at a time!)
- Worldle
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This game gives you the outline of the day’s mystery country, and you have 6 chances to get it right. Once you guess the country for the day, there are also bonus levels you can play naming the countries that border it and the primary languages spoken.
- Travle
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My brother introduced me to this game relatively recently. Every day you are given two countries, and your goal is to name the countries between them to draw the shortest route that you can travel (hence the name), but you can win the game even if you don’t create the shortest route, as long as you do it within the number of guesses. There are also different versions, with states in different countries (like India, Germany, the United States and more), where you name the connecting states to create a route.Â
- Linxicon
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This is the first of several games from Trainwreck Labs that I really enjoy. Every day, the game gives you two unrelated words, like “link” and “lexicon” (where the name comes from), and you have to connect them by creating a chain of words with related meanings. It sounds a little confusing, but once you start actually playing it makes a lot more sense. This is a newer game, I think it’s been out for a little under two months, but it’s really fun to play. It’s a great way to challenge yourself to think about words in new ways and to find connections between words you wouldn’t typically think of as similar.
- Globle and Globle Capitals
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This is another Trainwreck Labs game, where you also have to guess the country of the day (for the classic version) or the capital of the day (in the capitals version). However, unlike Worldle, you don’t get the outline of the country and have to guess the name. Instead, you are presented with a globe, and have to start guessing countries. Each country that you guess will light up on the globe, in colors ranging from white to dark red. The closer you are, the warmer the country you guessed will appear on the globe, up to the darkest red for countries that are adjacent to the answer.
In the capitals version, you have to guess the mystery capital city of the day, and each of your guesses will be marked with a colored dot. In this game, the colors go from black through the whole rainbow, with the darkest red again being the closest to the answer. A line is drawn between your guess and the guess before it, and the lines between cities have gradient colors as well, showing how close to the answer each of the areas the line passes over is. I won’t lie, I often have to open up Google Maps and start scrolling around to come up with countries and cities to guess in these two games, but throughout playing I need it less and less.
- Metaflora and Metazooa
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The last two Trainwreck Labs games that I want to introduce are Metaflora and Metazooa. They have the same format, which is why they’re in the same listing, but in Metaflora you’re trying to guess the plant of the day, and in Metazooa the animal of the day. Each guess that you put in builds a phylogenetic tree, and you can see what branch the correct answer is in relation to everything you’ve guessed before. The game will provide you with the Wikipedia summary of the closest group relation to the correct answer that you’ve guessed after each guess, but I also find it helpful to look up the families or clades that pop up in the tree and try to find some of the plants/animals in them so that I have some ideas about what to guess. It might sound a little bit overwhelming, but the games limit the number of possible plants/or animals that you can guess, and you get 25 guesses to figure it out. Plus, it’s fun to watch the tree grow as you guess.Â