I found the Dark Souls of Wordle-likes and it’s my new daily puzzle fixation

Wordle isn’t quite the draw for me it once was. I still play it most days, but I’m not hitting it first thing in the morning and I don’t care about preserving a streak anymore. Sorry, Wordle: the spark is gone.

If, like me, you’re on the hunt for a new daily puzzle game, you should take a look at Hunch, which has Wordle-style play but is much, much harder. Put it this way: it’s gonna take you more than 6 guesses. Maybe a lot more. Hunch is the Dark Souls of Wordle, basically.

In Hunch, you’ve got the familiar 5-letter grid to guess the secret word, and after your first guess (mine is always SOUPY, what’s yours?) you see which letters are in the right place (tallied in green) and which are in the wrong place but still in the word (yellow).

Thing is, Hunch doesn’t tell you which letters are in the right places the way Wordle does. So if SOUPY gets you a green tally of one, all you know is one of the letters in SOUPY is in the right place. If you then try STAKE to see if it’s the S, you might get zero green and one yellow tally, which means S wasn’t in the right place, but still might be in the word.

Or, it might not: that one yellow tally could mean T, A, K, or E are in the word. Try POSTS next and find out that none of those letters are in the word: congrats, you’ve already burned 3 guesses just to eliminate that S.

It’s Mastermind meets Wordle, essentially, so you can easily blow through a dozen or so guesses before you even really get a handle on what the word could be. Unlike Wordle, there’s no limit on guesses, so you just keep on going until you figure it out. I’ve… I’ve had some really, really long runs before I figured out the word. Too long to share with you.

Hunch has a daily puzzle to wrap your brain around, and a cool “cascade” mode that requires solving three words consecutively. If you create an account there’s even a multiplayer mode where you can challenge a friend to see who’s got better hunches. Hunch was created by designer Bennette Sebastian and you can play it here.