The best daily puzzle games like Wordle that are not word games are Framed and Artle for your eyes, Worldle and Globle for maps, Nerdle for arithmetic, Pips and Queens for pure logic, Bandle for your ears, and Murdle or Clues by Sam for deduction. Every game below is free in a web browser, posts a new puzzle each day, and was loaded and checked in September 2026 before it went on this list.
What Wordle got right was never the vocabulary. It was the shape of the thing: one puzzle, the same for everyone, done in a few minutes, shared without spoilers. That shape now carries almost every kind of thinking. If words are not your thing, or you already play three word games and want your morning to use a different part of your head, the list below is sorted by the kind of attention each game asks for.
The list at a glance
| Game | What you do | Minutes | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Framed | Name the film from a still; each miss reveals another frame | Under 5 | framed.wtf |
| Artle | Name the artist from up to four artworks | Under 5 | nga.gov/artle |
| Hexcodle | Match the day's color by its hex code | Under 5 | hexcodle.com |
| Worldle | Name the country from its outline | Under 5 | worldle.teuteuf.fr |
| Globle | Find a mystery country by hot and cold colors | Under 5 | globle-game.com |
| Travle | Name the countries on a route between two others | 3 to 8 | travle.earth |
| TimeGuessr | Place five photos on the map and in time | 5 to 10 | timeguessr.com |
| Nerdle | Find the hidden calculation | Under 5 | nerdlegame.com |
| Mathler | Find an equation that hits the target | Under 5 | mathler.com |
| Tradle | Name the country from a chart of its exports | Under 5 | oec.world |
| Pips | Place dominoes so every region meets its rule | 2 to 15 | nytimes.com/games/pips |
| Queens | One queen per row, column, and color region | 2 to 5 | linkedin.com/games/queens |
| Memoku | Memory crossed with Sudoku | 5 to 10 | puzzmo.com |
| Lichess Daily Puzzle | Find the best move in one chess position | 2 to 5 | lichess.org |
| Bandle | Name the song as instruments join one by one | Under 5 | bandle.app |
| Spotle | Name the artist from clues about each guess | Under 5 | spotle.io |
| Murdle | Solve a murder with a logic grid | 5 to 15 | murdle.com |
| Clues by Sam | Prove who is criminal and who is innocent | 5 to 20 | cluesbysam.com |
| Mystery-o-matic | Work out who did it, when, and with what | About 5 | mystery-o-matic.com |
Minutes are our rough estimate for an ordinary day, not a figure the games publish, except Mystery-o-matic, which promises a case in about five. Hard days run longer everywhere.
Visual: games for your eyes
Framed
A film a day, guessed from its stills. You start with one frame, and each wrong guess unveils another, up to six. Film fans have an obvious edge, but a careful look at costume, color and set dressing narrows the decade before memory does. One-frame, poster and title shot variants and an archive of missed days sit alongside it.
Artle
The National Gallery of Art in Washington shows you an artwork and asks who made it. You have four guesses, and skipping one brings another artwork to jog your memory. It rewards knowing how an artist works (subjects, palette, brushwork) more than knowing a few famous pictures.
Hexcodle
Match the day's color by typing its six-character hex code. Arrows under each digit tell you whether to go higher or lower, and you get five guesses. A week of it and you start to read hex values by eye, which is a useful skill or a strange one, depending on your job.
For spot-the-difference and hidden-object puzzles, which have a daily circuit of their own, see our list of daily spot-the-difference games.
Geography: games for the map
Worldle
Name the country or territory from its outline in six guesses. Every miss reports the distance, the compass direction and a proximity score, so a wrong answer is still a clue. Past game number 1,700, it still holds up.
Globle
No outline at all: guess any country and the globe colors it by how close it sits to the mystery country, hotter as you approach. It is the gentlest game on this list and quietly good at teaching where small countries actually are.
Travle
You get a start and an end (on the day we checked, Portugal to Moldova) and name the countries that link them in as few guesses as possible. It is less about recognizing shapes than about holding a map in your head.
TimeGuessr
Five photographs a day, each placed twice: a pin on the world map and a year on a slider. Cars, clothes, signage and architecture are the evidence, which makes it the most detective-like of the map games. WhenTaken, from the team behind Worldle, runs the same idea with its own daily photos.
Numbers: games for arithmetic
Nerdle
Wordle's structure with a calculation instead of a word: find the hidden eight-character equation in six guesses. Every guess has to be valid arithmetic, so the colored tiles teach you about operators as well as digits. Mini and harder variants sit alongside the classic.
Mathler
The answer is given and the equation is hidden. Every guess must equal the target number, which forces real mental arithmetic on each line rather than letter-style elimination. Four difficulty levels each get a new puzzle daily.
Tradle
From the Observatory of Economic Complexity: a treemap of one country's exports and six guesses to name the country, with distance and direction after each miss. What a place sells to the world turns out to be strong evidence of where it is.
Logic: games for pure reasoning
Pips
The New York Times' domino puzzle. Place every domino so each colored region meets its rule: a sum, all pips equal, a total under some number. Easy, Medium and Hard puzzles post every day, and the daily puzzle played without an account when we checked.
Queens
LinkedIn's daily grid: one queen in every row, column and colored region, and no two queens touching, even diagonally. It is a small, clean constraint puzzle, and it played in a browser without signing in when we checked.
Memoku
Memory crossed with Sudoku, from Puzzmo's daily lineup: blank tiles hide the numbers, you tap to reveal matching pairs, and each number appears nine times in the grid. The page sits next to crosswords, but Memoku itself has no words in it, and it played without an account.
Lichess Daily Puzzle
One chess position a day and one instruction: find the best move. Lichess is free, open source and ad-free, and the puzzle needs no account. You do need to know how the pieces move; after that it is pure calculation.
If you like the feeling of a constraint snapping shut, it is worth practising on purpose. Our deductive reasoning exercises are ten drills built for exactly that.
Music: games for your ears
Bandle
Guess the song while the band plays it one instrument at a time; the fewer instruments you need, the better your score. It is the most social game here: people who never play puzzles will happily argue about a bass line.
Spotle
Guess the day's artist in ten tries. Each guess shows how your pick compares on debut year, members, popularity, gender, genre and country, so it plays more like a deduction grid than a listening test.
Deduction: games for evidence
Murdle
A murder a day from G. T. Karber: suspects, weapons and locations, a list of clues, and a logic grid to cross off until who, how and where lock together. The writing is funny, and newcomers can start with the daily mini before the full case.
Clues by Sam
Twenty people in a grid, each criminal or innocent. Everyone tells the truth, and the game will not let you guess: a mark is accepted only when the clues already prove it. Puzzles get harder through the week, so Monday is a warm-up and the weekend is a project.
Mystery-o-matic
A murder generated by a program every day: work out who did it, when, and with which weapon, from where everyone was and when. It promises a case in about five minutes, and the code behind it is public.
Daily Holmes starts from a photograph instead of a grid: one scene a day, usually a room someone lives in, and a question about the person or the event behind it. Some days you write your reasoning and an AI examiner grades it; other days you mark the evidence in the image or decide which statement is the lie. Every format is on the modes page. We make Daily Holmes.
If this is the section you came for, we map the murder dailies in more depth in games like Murdle and weigh the two biggest against each other in Murdle vs Clues by Sam.
Building a morning out of them
Pick from different sections rather than three from one. A map game, a logic game and an evidence game use three different kinds of attention, none of them takes long, and the rotation keeps any single format from going stale. Several of them keep an archive or the last few days of puzzles, so a missed morning is not always a lost one.
Ready to practise?
A new visual case lands every morning. Study the scene and solve it in the day's format. Written deductions receive AI feedback; structured modes check your answer directly.
Play today's caseFrequently asked questions
Is there a Wordle for numbers?
Yes. Nerdle hides a calculation instead of a word and gives you six guesses to find it. Mathler turns the idea around: you are shown the answer and must find an equation that produces it. Both post a new puzzle every day and are free in a browser.
What is the geography version of Wordle?
Worldle is the closest: name a country from its outline in six guesses, with the distance and direction of each miss. Globle swaps the outline for hot and cold colors on a globe, and Travle asks for the chain of countries between two others.
Is there a daily music game like Wordle?
Bandle is the one to try first: you name a song while the band adds one instrument at a time. Spotle is the artist version, where each guess shows how close you are on details such as debut year, genre, and country.
Are these daily puzzle games free?
Every daily puzzle on this list was free to play in a web browser when we checked it in September 2026. Some sell extras such as archive access, ad removal, puzzle packs, or books, and a few ask for a free account to keep stats or open past puzzles.