Fourteen daily puzzles that hide one answer and give you a number, a colour or a distance instead of the letters. Two of them you can play right here.
Updated 2026-08-15 · 14 games · 2 playable here
Contexto belongs to a category that barely existed before 2022: the daily puzzle with one
shared answer, no account, and a mechanic that gives you partial information rather than a
yes or a no. Wordle invented the format; the games below took the format and swapped out
what is being measured. Some measure meaning, some measure distance on a map, some measure
whether you can sort sixteen words into four groups without falling for the trap the editor
set for you.
They split cleanly into three groups, and knowing which group a game is in tells you almost
everything about how it will feel to play.
The three kinds of daily puzzle
Semantic games — Contexto, Semantle, Cemantle, Pimantle — hide a word and
score your guesses by meaning. There is no letter feedback at all; spelling is irrelevant.
They reward vocabulary breadth and the ability to think in categories, they take ten to
thirty minutes, and they are the only games here you genuinely cannot lose. If you want the
mechanics of that scoring explained properly,
our guide to how Contexto's ranking works covers the
embedding model in plain language and applies to all four.
Proximity games — Globle and its variants — use the same warmer/colder
idea but in a space you can already picture. Because geography is two-dimensional and your
mental map is decent, these are dramatically easier and finish in five to ten guesses. They
are the best entry point for someone who bounces off word games.
Constraint games — Wordle, Dordle, Phrazle, Quordle, Octordle,
Connections, Waffle, Squardle — give you rules to satisfy rather than a gradient to climb.
They are short, they have a fail state, and they reward systematic elimination. They are
also the only ones you can meaningfully solve optimally, which is why so much analysis
exists for them.
Two of these are hosted on this site and playable below without leaving the page. Five more
have full write-ups of their own, and seven are covered inline further down.
Playable here
Both boards run on this site — no download, no account, and they work on a phone. They are
letter games rather than meaning games, so they make a good change of pace from
today's Contexto puzzle.
These do not get their own page — either because they are variations on a game already
covered, or because there genuinely is not eight hundred words to say about them. All seven
are free and browser-based.
01
Quordle
Four Wordle grids at once, nine guesses shared between them.
Every guess you type is played simultaneously on all four boards, so the game becomes an exercise in resource allocation rather than deduction. The correct strategy is counter-intuitive: burn two or three guesses on pure information words that solve nothing, because a board you solve early frees capacity for the three you have not. Daily and practice modes both exist, and the practice mode is where the strategy is actually learnable.
02
Octordle
The same idea taken to eight grids and thirteen guesses.
Octordle is Quordle past the point of comfort, and it changes the game again — with eight boards you can no longer hold every constraint in your head, so it becomes a note-taking puzzle. Its Rescue mode, where a single wrong guess ends the run, is the hardest daily word game in regular circulation.
03
Redactle
A Wikipedia article with every word blacked out. Guess it back.
You are shown a redacted Wikipedia article and reveal it word by word by guessing vocabulary. Common words come free; the puzzle is working out the subject from the shape of what remains. It is the closest thing on this list to actual research, rounds routinely run past a hundred guesses, and it shares Contexto's core pleasure — reasoning from context alone. Its successor Redactle Unlimited keeps the archive alive.
04
Waffle
A finished word grid, scrambled. Fix it in fifteen swaps.
Waffle inverts the genre: you are given the solved board with its letters in the wrong places and must restore it by swapping pairs. Because the answer is already in front of you, there is no vocabulary component at all — it is pure constraint-solving, and it is solvable deterministically with enough patience. The scoring rewards finishing in fewer swaps than the fifteen you are allowed.
05
Squardle
Wordle on a grid, with feedback in two directions at once.
Every cell in Squardle belongs to both a row word and a column word, and each guess returns feedback for both. The result is dense to the point of being genuinely difficult to read — a single guess can produce a dozen simultaneous constraints. It is the most information-rich board of any game here, and the one most likely to reward drawing the state out on paper.
06
Pimantle
Semantle with a map, so you can see where your guesses landed.
Pimantle plots your guesses on a two-dimensional projection of the embedding space alongside the answer's region. Seeing the semantic map is a genuinely different experience — regions you thought were adjacent turn out to be nowhere near each other. If Contexto's ranking has ever felt arbitrary to you, an hour with Pimantle will fix that faster than any explanation.
07
Costcodle
Guess the price of a Costco item in six tries.
The purest higher-or-lower game on this list, and the most quietly addictive. There is no vocabulary and no strategy beyond calibration — you are being tested on whether your model of what things cost matches reality, and it usually does not. It takes ninety seconds and belongs in a rotation rather than a session.
at a glance
All fourteen compared
The columns that matter are what is being measured and whether you can lose. Those two
decide how a session feels far more than the theme does.
Game
What it measures
Can you lose?
Typical session
Difficulty
Contexto
Meaning, as a rank out of ~30,000
No
10–20 min
3/5
Semantle
Meaning, as raw cosine similarity
No
30–90 min
5/5
Cemantle
Meaning, in French
No
30–90 min
5/5
Pimantle
Meaning, plotted on a 2D map
No
20–40 min
4/5
Globle
Distance between countries
No
3–6 min
2/5
Redactle
Vocabulary against a hidden article
No
30–90 min
5/5
Wordle
Letters and their positions
Yes — six guesses
2–4 min
2/5
Dordle
Letters, on two boards at once
Yes — seven guesses
4–8 min
3/5
Phrazle
Letters across a whole phrase
Yes — six guesses
4–8 min
4/5
Quordle
Letters, across four boards
Yes — nine guesses
5–8 min
3/5
Octordle
Letters, across eight boards
Yes — thirteen guesses
10–15 min
4/5
Connections
Which sixteen words group into four
Yes — four mistakes
3–6 min
4/5
Waffle
Restoring a scrambled solved grid
Yes — fifteen swaps
2–5 min
2/5
Squardle
Letters, in two directions at once
Yes — limited guesses
8–15 min
5/5
Why they all reset at midnight
Every game on this list gives you exactly one puzzle a day, and every one of them could
trivially give you a hundred. The restriction is the product. It does three things at once,
and understanding them explains why the genre exploded and why unlimited clones of these
games never take hold the same way.
It makes the result shareable. Because everyone is on the same puzzle, a
score is comparable, and a comparable score is worth posting. Wordle's emoji grid was the
first version of this and it is the single most-copied idea in casual gaming.
It makes a bad day survivable. If you could play again immediately, a
hundred-guess round would feel like incompetence. Because you cannot, it feels like the day
being hard — and everyone else had the same day.
And it makes the habit cheap. A game that asks for four minutes once a day
costs almost nothing to keep, which is why these sit in people's morning routines years after
the trend that produced them passed. Contexto's own
unlimited mode exists precisely because it is the
exception rather than the rule: it is a practice tool, deliberately kept outside the streak.
The technical side is simpler than it looks. Most of these games ship the whole answer list
to your browser and pick from it by date, which is why they work offline and why the answer
is identical everywhere in the world. The semantic games are the exception — the ranking
table is far too large to ship, so those hold it on a server and look your guess up.
Which one should you play
If you have two minutes: Wordle, or Costcodle if you have already done
today's. If you have five: Connections or Globle. If you have fifteen and want to think: Contexto. If you have an hour and something to prove: Semantle or Redactle.
If you are learning a language, the semantic games are unusually good practice — they force
you to produce vocabulary in a field rather than recognise it, which is the harder
direction. Cemantle is the obvious choice for
French; Contexto itself runs native Portuguese and Spanish editions with their own word
lists, so the Brazilian puzzle and the Spanish one are different words from the English one
on any given day.
And if you have not done today's yet, play today's Contexto puzzle — it is
still the one on this list with the best ratio of thinking to time spent.
