Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking
I always thought it was cool when someone could make a plausible estimate from reasonable guesses. I recently learned that these are sometimes named after Enrico Fermi, the famous physicist, and its the same technique used to create his famous Fermi paradox. You build a rough logic chain using a few sliders and fixed quantities (e.g. weeks per year), and the goal is to get within an order of magnitude of the true answer. The math is simple; the thinking is the game. Would love feedback.
Fermi is a daily estimation game that teaches order-of-magnitude thinking inspired by physicist Enrico Fermi. Players build logic chains using sliders and fixed quantities to estimate answers to real-world questions… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1WS
Some months ago @andrewrn tried to create a Wordle-style site for order-of-magnitude thinking. This was a wonderful idea, but the actual site was somewhat over-engineered and confusing. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43632278) In the past week, I looked at this idea again and built a very simple site which gives you a new Fermi estimation question every day: How many new cars were sold in the US in 2024?; How many humans have ever lived (including those currently alive)?; How many chickens are slaughtered for meat every year? To win, you need a guess within ±20% of the…
2025 · fermiquestions.org · its alternatives →
- 2
- 3IM
This is the first iteration of a short game I’m making that tries to interactively explain some of my favorite math questions / ideas. My goal is mostly to get the player curious and not necessarily to explain absolutely everything. There were a lot of fun technical parts to building this: - For implementation reasons, it’s much easier if the lines all have integer intersection points with each other. To do this, when a new line is added I “cheat” by rounding intersections to integers and then splitting the old lines at the intersection into new linds (with potentially different slopes)…
2024 · rahulilango.com · its alternatives →
- 4
An educational puzzle game. Solve a series of tasks where you build increasingly powerful components. Starts with the simplest logical components and ends up with a programmable computer.
2018 · nandgame.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Hello, HN! Figure is a little side project I’ve been working on. Someone described it as Bejeweled meets Wordle. I built the puzzle interface and website in Next.js and React, which was a first for me and overall a great learning experience. The daily puzzle data is queued up in a PostgreSQL table. Another table stores anonymous solve stats. Once a day, a cron job hits a serverless API that promotes the next puzzle as “live” and prompts Next.js to update the prebaked static site with the new data. The game state is managed with Redux and your stats are persisted to localStorage. Framer…
2022 · figure.game · its alternatives →
- 6
I made this game for my children to play, as they are heavily into Wordle, and I thought they'd also like something maths based! Every puzzle is solvable and has at least one solution (usually more). There is a kids mode in the settings, plus a hard mode for extra difficulty.
2022 · summle.net · its alternatives →
- 7AD
2025 · rvlabs.ca · its alternatives →
- 8
Hey, maker here. After launching a daily word search game, I randomly thought of this math game while driving. Finally got around to making it and I think it turned out pretty cool. It’s a math search game that’s meant to help you practice your quick addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division skills. I’m hoping it’ll help people (even those like me who aren’t big on math) learn and increase their speeds. (There are also some settings you can enable to make the game harder) If you try it out, please let me know if you found it fun, if you have anything you’d like me to add, or if you…
2024 · worchle.com · its alternatives →
- 9
I built ChipBuilder to make computer architecture more approachable through interactive puzzles. You start with basic logic gates like AND, OR, and NOT, then gradually combine them into adders, multiplexers, memory, an ALU, and eventually a complete CPU. Once you've built the hardware, you can write assembly programs that run on the processor you created. The game is inspired by courses like Nand2Tetris, but everything runs directly in the browser with a visual circuit editor, simulations, and progressively harder challenges.
Jul 2026 · select.supply · its alternatives →
- 10
Inspired by games like Turing Complete/Virtual Circuit Board/Logic World, I tried to make a mix of aseprite and wiredworld/wired-logic, the idea being the user can build a digital circuit using a "fullstack" pixelart creation workflow. The circuit is just an image. The primitives are (i) connected wires which have undefined, 0 or 1 state during simulation (displayed brighter or darker in function of the state) and (ii) NANDs, which are little pixel triangles. During simulation the user can interact with any wire by clicking on it, toggling its state, which is cool for messing…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Hi HN, I made this small game in my spare time. It's quite addictive, I spent a lot of hours playing instead of polishing it. My own highscore is 96,792. Source code is at https://github.com/MikeBellika/tile-game. It's made with react, tailwind, and framer motion. Hope you enjoy!
2024 · bellika.dk · its alternatives →
- 12AS
I really like the look of the famous album art for Unknown Pleasures [1]. It was originally created by Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory from the signals of the first discovered radio pulsar [2]. I made a spectrogram that produces a similar look. It runs FFT in Rust and visualizes it with WebGL. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UnknownPleasuresVinyl.jpg [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1919%2B21
2024 · aestuans.github.io · its alternatives →
- 13
I’ve been building a few small games to help kids (and curious adults) build reasoning and logic skills. Think Word Ladder, Prime Hunter, Math Maze ,all in the browser, no installs. Would love feedback or suggestions for new types of puzzles
2025 · quizmathgenius.com · its alternatives →
- 14
I received a ticket from my product manager (my wife) to add a new feature for our largest customer (my kindergartner). The requirements doc included a worksheet from school that looked like this. I took that exact screenshot (blurriness, bad lighting, scribbles, and all) and…
2025 · mattsayar.com · its alternatives →
- 15
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 →
- 16
- 17
- 18AM
Wordle reminded me of Mastermind, a game I played as kid, so just for fun I made a version of the game that plays a lot more like Mastermind. I think this version is way more challenging :)
2022 · playhurdle.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 19
- 20GD
2019 · adventuresinlogicland.com · its alternatives →
- 21
- 22
A Wordle-like game where you have to guess the unsigned 8-bit binary number!
2022 · jamesl.me · its alternatives →
- 23
- 24
I've been playing with this for quite some time and I think it's finally ready for public consumption. All feedback welcome.
2025 · madmonk13.github.io · its alternatives →
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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 →