Daily games like Wordle
There are something like a thousand daily browser games now, nearly all of them built on the same shape Wordle settled: one puzzle, a handful of guesses, feedback that narrows the answer, and a result you can post without spoiling it. This is not a list of a thousand. It is the ones that have lasted, one or two per genre, with the games closest to what we do at the top.
Dickle is one of them, so treat the list accordingly — but the descriptions are straight, and where another game does something better than we do, it says so. Nothing here is sponsored and there are no affiliate links.
Guess-the-number games
Dickle's actual genre, and a surprisingly empty one. Of the thousand-odd daily games, almost all of them ask you to identify something: a word, a country, a film, a song. Very few hand you the subject and ask you to put a number on it, which is a different skill and a much less comfortable one — you find out immediately that your sense of a figure you have never looked up is not as good as it feels.
Pricele
Guess what an everyday thing costs in a different country each day — a Big Mac in Norway, petrol in Egypt — in five tries, on a hotter/colder scale.
Same maker Built and maintained by the same person as Dickle, to the same rule: every figure names the source it came from.
vs. Dickle The nearest game to this one anywhere, and the only other daily puzzle we know of built the same way round: it names the country and asks you for a published figure, rather than hiding the country behind clues. Every price on it prints the source it came from and the date it was collected, which is the part almost nothing else in this genre does. If the thing you like here is being made to commit to a number and then shown exactly where the real one came from, it is the obvious next tab.
Tradle
Identify a country from a treemap of everything it exports, in six tries.
vs. Dickle The closest thing to a direct peer: a real published dataset, played as a daily puzzle, with the source visible. Tradle gives you the data and asks for the country; Dickle gives you the country and asks for the data.
Countryle
Find the hidden country from clues about its hemisphere, temperature, population and continent.
vs. Dickle Also built on country statistics, but they're the hints rather than the answer. You're never asked to put a number on anything.
The version of this Dickle plays is one published figure per country, each tied to a named study. The country pages are readable without playing, and methodology sets out the four ways any of those figures can be wrong.
The games closest to Dickle have a full head-to-head comparison each: the two rulebooks side by side, a verdict on every dimension, and a section on what the other game does better.
Geography
Worldle
Identify a country from its outline, with distance and direction to the answer after each guess.
vs. Dickle The daily game whose feedback model Dickle's warmth meter most resembles: you are told how far off you are, not what you got wrong.
Globle
Name the mystery country with unlimited guesses on a spinning globe that warms as you close in.
Flagle
Work out a country from its flag, revealed one tile of six at a time.
Travle
Get from one country to another in as few border crossings as you can.
GeoGuessr
Work out where you are from a street-level photograph. The free tier is limited; the daily challenge is the part most people play.
Words
Wordle
Guess a five-letter word in six tries. The game every other one on this page is descended from.
Connections
Sort sixteen words into four groups of four that share something. Four mistakes and it's over.
Quordle
Four Wordle grids at once, nine guesses, shared between them.
Waffle
Swap letters around a filled waffle-shaped grid until every across and down word is correct, in fifteen moves.
Trivia and film
Framed
Name a film from one frame, then another, up to six, each less obscure than the last.
Chronophoto
Guess the year a photograph was taken. Five photographs, scored on how close you get.
Bandle
Name a song from instruments added one at a time, as if the band were arriving late.
Numbers and logic
Where to find the rest
The genre is catalogued better by the people who collect it than by anyone writing a list like this one. If you want the full sprawl, including the several hundred games too niche to justify a line here, start with these.
What makes one of these last
Most daily games are abandoned within a year, and the ones above are the survivors, so the pattern is worth naming. The games that last are the ones where the answer is a fact rather than a whim: a country's outline, a published figure, the year a photograph was taken. That gives the puzzle somewhere to come from tomorrow, and it gives a player something to be right about.
The ones that die are usually the ones where the daily answer was hand-picked. That works for a few weeks and then it is a second job. Dickle's answers are published study figures, and the rotation is arithmetic, which is the whole reason it can keep going without anyone deciding anything each morning. It is also why the rotation is twenty-four countries and not fifty: a country joins when a study exists for it, not when a gap needs filling.