Games like Wordle but not words: 14 checked

Nobody rechecks these lists. A player in r/puzzlevideogames answers a recommendation with six words: "The website is no longer running." Another one quits the day a game stops being free: "I'm SO disappointed in the NYT for making it paid only. Forget it." Both things keep happening, and a link from 2024 is a coin flip.

Every one of these is Wordle with a different subject

Worldle hands you a grey country shape and six tries. Miss, and it tells you how far off you were and which way to go. Framed shows one frame from a film, then a second one when you get it wrong. Bandle plays a song with a single instrument and adds the next one each time you miss. Same skeleton underneath: one puzzle a day, the same puzzle for everybody, a handful of guesses, a result you can paste into a group chat without spoiling it.

Ask someone what they play and they hand you a list of subjects. One player describes the group chat behind it:

I have a couple of friends in a group chat that share our scores for Framed, Moviegrid and Geogrid. Two movie nuts and a geography nerd. Guess which one I am. A player in r/geoguessr

The geography people keep four map games and never touch the film one. The film people do the opposite.

Fifteen that ran this week

I opened each one in the same browser, twelve on the morning of 9 September, two more on 10 September and one on 15 September. The last column is what actually happened when the page loaded.

Four of them are maps. Globle wants the same answer as Worldle and colours your guesses hot or cold on a globe. Travle walks you from one country to another, today Croatia to Andorra in seven moves. Tradle hides the country behind its export chart.

Then the pictures. TimeGuessr gives you a photo and wants two answers, a pin on the map and a year on the slider, five rounds of it. Chronophoto keeps the year and drops the map. Guess The Game does the Framed trick with screenshots.

Costcodle names a product, today a 3.75 oz tin of smoked oysters, and waits for a price. Fermi asks how many olives fill a one litre bottle of olive oil. roughly asks where the red fox lives and hands you a pin.

Three came in after the first round. Songdle plays a song and wants the artist, the title and the year it came out. Geopolitix hands you five countries and one statistic, annual rainfall on the day I played, and you drag them into order. GeoRiddler reads you a riddle about a place and wants a pin on the map, as close as you can get.

Nobody plays fifteen a day. Most people keep two or three and forget the rest.

I publish this list, and one of the fifteen is mine

roughly is the first row, and it is mine. Read the table for what it says: the middle column tells you what you guess, and it never ranks anybody. Every row went through the same browser on the same morning. If you want to check me on it, Where? asks where an animal lives instead of which country you are looking at, and How expensive? wants a price the way Costcodle does. Play those two against the rows above and decide for yourself.

This holds for today, not for November

A game can run on 9 September and be gone by Christmas. That is simply how this genre ends. And if it turns out you liked the letters after all, this page is no help, because all fifteen dropped them on purpose.

Pick the subject you already argue about with somebody. Play that one for a week at the same time of day and let the other fourteen go. Then come back here when it stops loading, because one of them will.