If you want a free alternative to NYT's Wordle and Spelling Bee, M-W's got your back.
I used to begin my day with a quick scroll through social media, but eventually realized it’s not a great idea to become filled with rage and despair before I even get out of bed in the morning. So, now I play daily puzzles instead to jump-start my brain, which means I don’t become filled with rage and despair until around lunchtime. Nice!
For a long time, the New York Times’ Wordle and Spelling Bee were my go-tos daily word puzzles, but recently I started looking around for something different (but not too different). There are plenty of daily puzzles scattered here and there around the web, and a lot of games like Wordle to play, but I noticed this week that trusty ol’ dictionary site Merriam-Webster has put together a nice little collection of free daily puzzle games you can play on your phone or in a browser at your desktop.
First there’s Blossom, which is M-W’s take on Spelling Bee, and after playing for a few days I think I actually prefer Blossom’s version of the word puzzle. It works mostly the same: you’ve got one central letter surrounded by six others, and you have to build words from those letters, always using the central letter at least once in each word.
But instead of guessing as many words as you can the way you do in Spelling Bee, you’re limited to a total of 12 guesses—which encourages finding longer words instead of simply mashing in every single word that pops into your head. Each turn also highlights one letter on the blossom’s petals, meaning you get a five-point bonus for each use of that letter on that turn. So, if it highlights the letter T, and you can find a word with a bunch of Ts in it, you’re gonna get a nice big combo bonus. Like Spelling Bee, there are pangrams—words that use every letter in the puzzle at least once—that give you an extra bonus to your score, too.
So, your Spelling Bee needs are covered. How about your Wordle fix? I didn’t notice this until last week but Quordle is now a part of Merriam-Webster’s puzzle arsenal. Quordle was one of the early and excellent Wordle-alikes, where you tackle 4 Wordle-ish puzzles all at once. You have more guesses than you do in Wordle, and you’re gonna need ’em—Quordle is a pretty darn tricky puzzle and I fail it more often than I beat it. But M-W gives you different difficulty levels that allow more or fewer guesses depending on what sort of challenge you’re after. Beating Quordle also unlocks a weekly challenge puzzle for a little more brainwork.
M-W also has something NYT doesn’t: a trivia game. In Tightrope you’re given nine trivia questions with multiple choice answers, and 15 seconds to answer each of them. If you miss three of the nine, the tightrope breaks (though you’re allowed to start over from the beginning again). The questions start easy on Monday but get progressively harder during the week.
M-W’s daily crossword, The Missing Letter, unfortunately isn’t in the same class as the NYT’s crossword, but it’s still a decent puzzle and has a couple of fun gimmicks. Some clues use definitions from the Merriam-Webster dictionary, each beginning with a different letter (helpful if you’re stuck on one), and each puzzle features a missing letter that, at the end of the week, spell out a secret word. Not a bad motivation to finish the puzzle each day, really.
There are several more daily puzzles including Pilfer, a multiplayer game where you race to form words from letters as they drop onto the screen, Spell It, where you listen to a word being spoken and, y’know, spell it, plus a whole bunch of word quizzes to test your vocabulary. It’s a nice collection of games and puzzles, they’re all free, and if you’re looking for an alternative to doomscrolling or the NYT’s games, I’d give M-W a spot on your bookmarks bar.
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