Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to 18 Words, Zanagrams and Sunflowers Are Now PZL Games
A few months ago I shared 18 Words, Zanagrams and Sunflowers here, which loads of you ended up playing and sending really useful feedback. I’ve now brought all three together into PZL games along with three new daily games. Just wanted to say thanks to everyone here who played, commented and helped improve them. HN has been a big part of getting these games off the ground. I'v now had over 1 million players across them. Would love to hear what you think of the new site, and any feedback is very welcome.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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This is a game I wrote over the last month and a bit. The effort allocation was pretty different from what I've done in the past. The game design snapped together very quickly: I had the initial idea, played a couple of games on a spreadsheet to get a feel for the idea, and made one change based on those plays. After that everything felt just right through multiple rounds of playtesting. Likewise the puzzle generation is nowhere near as elaborate as in my previous game, fairly simple methods worked well and provided good variety. Instead I ended up spending silly amounts of time on curating…
2024 · huewords.snellman.net · its alternatives →
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Long time lurker here. My family had a pen-and-paper game we'd play on long drives to visit my great-grandmother. After she passed, I spent the holidays recreating it: https://a26z.fun How it works: Find 15 words from a category (like "Stone Fruits," "US States," or "Dog Breeds") as fast as you can. Once you meet the 15 word minimum, you can play for as long as you want. Each letter shows how many target words start with it (A¹ = one word starts with A, N² = two words start with N) That small ² in the bottom-right? Multi-word answers allowed. For "US States" with N², both "NEW…
Jan 2026 · a26z.fun · its alternatives →
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Hey everyone, I'm Fabio, a very long time lurker here. Today I want to celebrate and share with you, again, a game that I conceived more than 8 years ago. I shared it last week with all its history (if you're curious) [1], but it just stayed in the "shownew" and never reached the main "show" page, hopefully this time it'll do better (:crossed_fingers:)! What changed since last week? Today I've also published the mobile apps for both iOS and Android (last week it was just web), which are also my first mobile apps ever. So I believe it's still a worthwhile post and something to show :) I'd…
2024 · fiftygame.com · its alternatives →
- 6WB
Hi HN, I love building small games (as Pong, Wordle, Tetris, etc.), but they're never quite unique enough to justify their own site. So I built boring.game - a daily "boring" game where the social mechanics (predicting your score, challenging other users) is more interesting than the game itself. I started a HN team if you want to compare your results: https://boring.game/invite/SRhyUStjin You can also play all daily games without signing up, if that is what you prefer. Built with SvelteKit (first time using Svelte - loved it!). Would love feedback on both the concept and…
2025 · boring.game · its alternatives →
- 7IR
You can check the game here: https://select.supply/game/mindmaze. Curious to learn your feedback. I personally loved the game so much!
Apr 2026 · medium.com · its alternatives →
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DLES.gg▲14It's crazy, the world of Wordle style games is totally booming. After I made my own daily game, I started to be interested in the area, I started to collect games I found interesting and put together a directory. I shared it here and there and add a 'submit a game' button, I'm having about 3-5 new games submitted every single week, similarly in the r/wordgames there's a new game concept launched multiple times a week. This sector is totally booming. The cost of developing a game is close to 0 and all the non-coder people who had an idea are now shipping daily games. It's wild and…
2025 · dles.gg · its alternatives →
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I built a procedurally generated word-search game where the puzzle never ends - as you scroll, the grid expands infinitely and new words appear. It’s designed to be quick to pick up, satisfying to play, and a little addictive. The core game works without an account using the pre-defined games, but signing up allows you to generate games using any topic you can think of. I’d love feedback on gameplay, performance, and whether the endless format feels engaging over time. If you try it, I’d really appreciate any bug reports or suggestions. Thanks in advance!
Dec 2025 · endless-wordsearch.com · its alternatives →
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I had a dream on Nov 21, 2019 of a game. I woke up at 4:00pm that day, started programming it then, and 7 and 1/2 hours later, it was done. It's about you and a pink square going exploring. - otdav33/spelunko
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11IM
Hey there HN, I took a page from Wordle's mechanisms and made this game for fun for some friends and I. Check out Wheredle and let me know what you think of it! ↙ ↗ ↘ https://wheredle.xyz
2022 · wheredle.xyz · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! This is a word search game I launched in the beginning of this year - didn't get much traction then, but it's been posted around a bit (right now getting some traffic from kottke.org) and now has over 12,000 words found! Now that it's a little more filled out I figured I'd share it again. Really enjoying seeing what everyone is making on it - it appears most people start by just adding a few words to the big clump in the middle, then adding to other people's projects (or ruining them) and finally working on their own little concepts. My favorite is the kitty to the north. Hope you…
Jan 2026 · words.zip · its alternatives →
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Well HN, I've finally produced something I think is worthy of sharing, but I didn't do it "in a weekend". Yeah, it's an iOS puzzle game. And yeah, it's a game I built because I wanted to play it rather than based on market research, so all this sort of makes it the antithesis of a popular HN post. But whatever. Still hoping for some of that patented (har har) expert HN feedback. Critique any part of it except the music. Also, PM me for upgrade codes, or I can post some here if there's any interest. Download (it's free):…
2012 · itunes.apple.com · its alternatives →
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Yeamt▲22Sick of AI tools and endless work? Try 30 seconds of chaos
2025 · game.yeamt.com · its alternatives →
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hi hn! for the last few weeks i was working on this fun little variant of wordle. i know a few weeks sounds too much to work on this simple thing but i am a man of little attention so i am glad i finished this. There's actually a bit more stuff going on than it seems on the outside I also wrote a short blog post (a bit of word vomit) about this: https://sameerdahal.com/blog/crowd-wordle/ The whole code is also on Github: https://github.com/dahsameer/crowd-wordle Thanks
2025 · crowd-wordle.com · its alternatives →
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Hello everyone! I've finally finished my latest side project - a RPG game made in Blazor. It started as a small project to learn some Blazor (I'm .NET dev but kept mainly to backend and ASP.NET). I had such a good time coding it that at some point I decided to make a full featured game out of it. I might've have bitten off more that I could chew as RPGs have so many systems and elements but overall I think it worked out well, especially for a single person project. I want to hop on the next project soon so any comments/questions/tips than can make me better really appreciated!
2024 · whimsicalwyrm.itch.io · its alternatives →
- 17IB
The idea is to get from a starting word to a target word by creating a list of words to go in the middle. You can only change one letter at a time. Yesterday's words: https://twitter.com/ChangelistGame/status/1518695582151237632 Today's game: https://changelist.rocks/
2022 · its alternatives →
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Wordfall▲13I've been working on this for a while as an experiment and I'm now pretty happy with it. I've always written code, but I've always been a frankly incompetent frontend developer, and I've never really been able to talk myself into making a game; it was just too much trouble, even though I had ideas I wanted to try! Claude Code made it possible for the first time. I hope you like it. I'm still working on it!
2025 · playwordfall.com · its alternatives →
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Howdy HN. I wanted an excuse to do some lightweight JS/TS development and to get reacquainted with the Cloudflare stack, so I put together a daily word game. It's partially inspired by NYT's Spelling Bee and Wordle. The main goal is to find a specific word each day that uses each provided letter at least once. There's a secondary goal of finding as many words as possible. Right now progress is all stored on-device, but in the future I might add leaderboards or other competitive elements. Hope y'all enjoy!
2025 · wotd.is · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! In the last couple of weeks I've been working on Cranki: Cranki = Crosswords + Anki. (It's a stupid name tbh, haha) I like doing crosswords in Spanish (to learn vocab) but none of the apps out there allowed me to use my own list of words that I come across. So I built one instead. It's entirely client-side. No server, no database, no accounts, etc. Your words and stats are stored in local storage. I built this for myself but let me know if you like it!
Apr 2026 · cranki.app · its alternatives →
- 22MN
This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a long time, and I decided to finally code it up. In the same way that Scrabble decomposes words into letters, what if there was a game that decomposed letters into sub-shapes? There’s a lot of directions this could go, and I’m still exploring the possibility space. Enjoy. Suggestions welcome. It doesn’t have a real name yet.
2024 · shovemedia.com · its alternatives →
- 23IB
I had an idea for this concept for a while and decided to build a little website around it. It's kind of a silly idea but I'm really curious to see how it plays out. If you're a particularly curious person, be warned. By submitting a payment to the game, you get to see how many other people were curious enough to play. You will be ranked based on your payment amount, and get to discover some interesting insights about the game's dynamics. Hope you like it
2024 · thecuriositygame.com · its alternatives →
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I built a website for games that catch my eye or have something interesting going on. I made it for fun but then updating became a habit. Maybe you'll find your next "must-play" game here? GitHub repo: https://github.com/RaycatWhoDat/games-list
Nov 2025 · alistof.games · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Zanagrams alternatives
- Huewords, a Word and Logic Puzzle alternatives
- Wordrops alternatives
- A to Z – A word game I built from a childhood road trip memory alternatives
- Fifty – A game where you match numbers until you clear the board alternatives
- Wordle but you have to predict your score before playing alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →