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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to A word game a friend and I built. How did we do?

My friend and I have been working on this word game as a side project for about six months, and we’re excited to finally share it beyond our family and friends! The idea came from a simple game my friend used to play with his kids during long car rides — just using their heads and maybe a pencil and paper. He had such fond memories of it that we decided to bring it to life as a proper game. We’d love for you to try it out and let us know what you think! PS This is my first real frontend-heavy project, and clean code was not my priority, so I'm sure there is considerable room for improvement…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    I shared Word Slicer here a while back — it’s a free, ad-free, browser-based word game where you try to find 5 words in 5 minutes. Since then I’ve been improving it (daily challenge archive, cleaner UI, better stats), and I’d love more feedback from the HN crowd. In particular, I’m interested in thoughts on the gameplay flow, design/UX, and what would make it more engaging.

    2024 · wordslicer.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hi everybody. I occasionally make little browser-based games, and this is my latest attempt. It's not quite done, but it's quite playable (note: it does include audio): https://www.omiword.com/ This has been my occasional tinker target for ~5 years now, starting in the early days of Covid. The objective is to drag letter tiles within certain boundaries to spell four common American-English words. It hasn't got ads or anything, it's just supposed to be fun for its own sake. If people happen to like it, I might add an option for folks to make a small, one-time payment to unlock…

    2025 · omiword.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hi HN! Looking for feedback on this 1v1 and daily word dueling game I've built over the last few months. Play here: https://wordtrak.com/ Or on iOS here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wordtrak/id6760442363 (Android version soon!)

    May 2026 · wordtrak.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4IM

    Hi everyone, Wanted to share a game I built. It's called Unscramble! and I believe it's the simplest word building game. Rules: You get a few letters on screen. You need to make one word with all the letters. Tap a letter to select. Tap again to deselect. Faster you go, better you score. If you enter anagrams of the word it's looking for, it gives you extra points. If you are stuck, you can either "Ask Friend" or get Hint. You get extra points for getting the word fast but you don't get penalized for taking too long. I believe the simplicity of the game along with big touch buttons makes it…

    Sep 2026 · its alternatives →

  5. 5IB

    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 →

  6. 6

    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 →

  7. 7

    I'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 →

  8. 8

    Collaborative wordle-like game with video chat

    2022 · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    My partner and I built a daily word game that has elements of the Mini Crossword, Wordle, and Spelling Bee, with some twists all its own. I’ve been fairly obsessed with the New York Times crossword puzzle ever since I saw the documentary Wordplay about 12 years ago. I started with Mondays and gradually made my way up to Saturdays, and when I began to appreciate the puzzles as aesthetic objects worthy of appreciation and criticism (rather than just a slog to survive and then brag about), I began to wonder what it would be like to create puzzles. But making full crossword puzzles was always…

    2025 · triplit.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    Letters▲71

    I made a new daily word game for web and iOS which is a funky mix of scrabble and boggle. Each day everyone gets the same randomly generated configuration of bonus tiles and letters on a grid. The app is written completely in SwiftUI and the web port is written in ts/react. Both use the same random seeds each day.

    2015 · thelettersgame.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    The first fair word game challenge

    2016 · wordcrex.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Like a tiny game of Scrabble, generated each day

    2022 · cross-wordle.games · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Fan re-make of discontinued word game, Wordbase

    2021 · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Addictive Word Game

    2017 · its alternatives →

  15. 15
  16. 16NL

    I've been playing Wordle and remembered this puzzle game I used to play with my grandfather. It's inspired by the block puzzles in many newspapers but made to be shorter: just guess the nine letter word. So I made a quick thing to play with my family like we used to. I thought you guys might enjoy it.

    2022 · nineletterwordgame.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    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 →

  18. 18

    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 →

  19. 19MN

    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 →

  20. 20IM

    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 →

  21. 21

    Your new favorite word game: a new Daily and Mini every day. Drag lettered pieces into a frame and turn them until every row and column spells a word.

    16d ago · wordminos.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    My friends and I love playing description games, but got tired of the same old cards - so I made a simple web app with a fresh set of prompts, and a different timer mechanic: Rather than teams taking turns, everyone sits together, and you describe only one prompt at a time. As soon as you're done you pass the phone to the player on your left, who gets a new set of prompts to choose from, and so on. After an exponential (memoryless) random amount of time, the round ends (loudly!), and whoever was holding the phone at the time loses a life for their team. It's like Hot Potato. The prompts are…

    2025 · wilf.live · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    English is my second language. From my experience, I learnt that developing your vocabulary is a long and arduous process. Traditionally, learners used flashcards (or their digital incarnations). I wanted to build something more engaging and more effective in building your vocabulary. DictionaryGames is aimed mostly at ESL (English as a Second Language) students, but I am hoping it might be fun for any English language lovers. The project is in BETA, it is free, and no registration is required. I am looking for feedback to improve it. If you comment, please indicate if you are a native…

    2025 · dictionarygames.io · its alternatives →

  24. 24WB

    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 →

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