Pinteza/Guides/Best daily word games

Best free daily word games to play

A good daily word game gives everyone the same puzzle, takes a minute or two, and leaves you wanting tomorrow's. Below are the ones we actually keep in rotation. Most run in a browser with nothing to install. One of them is ours, and we say so plainly when we get to it.

Updated October 2026 by the team behind Pinteza. Full disclosure up front: we make one of the games on this list.

1. Pinteza free · Android now · iPhone and iPad later

   This is the one we make, so treat the praise with a pinch of salt. Pinteza is out now on Google Play for Android phones and tablets, with iPhone and iPad to follow. We built it around a daily word that is not always five letters: most days it is five, some days six, a couple of days in every twenty it is seven, and the seven-letter days get an extra guess.

   Beyond the Daily there are four more modes: Practice, where you pick 5, 6 or 7 letters, Sprint, a weekly Chaos rule twist, and one-versus-one Duo. It is free, with no ads and no account. The only purchase is one optional unlock for a campaign of hand-picked puzzles. It comes in English, European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, each edition with its own words, so the European Portuguese one is not a Brazilian list with the accents changed.

   Get Pinteza on Google Play

2. The New York Times word games web and app

   The obvious starting point. The famous five-letter daily is still free to play, and its sibling puzzles are excellent: Connections asks you to sort sixteen words into four hidden groups, and Strands is a themed word search where the answers snake across the board. If you only ever play one thing every morning, it is probably going to be one of these.

   Worth knowing: some NYT games are now for subscribers. Check what is open before you get attached.

3. Quordle free · web

   Four grids at once, nine guesses total, and every word you type is fired at all four boards. It sounds chaotic and it is, in a good way. Your opening word suddenly matters a lot more when it has to work four times over. A natural next step once the standard five-letter puzzle stops making you sweat.

4. Octordle free · web

   Eight boards, thirteen guesses. This is the deep end. It is more of a bookkeeping exercise than a quick coffee break, so it is not for every morning, but on a slow Sunday it is genuinely satisfying to untangle. Play Quordle first.

5. Waffle free · web and iPhone app

   The clever one. Instead of guessing, you rearrange a waffle-shaped grid of six overlapping words, and you only get fifteen swaps to sort the whole thing out. It rewards planning rather than vocabulary, which makes it feel different from everything else here. Short, and a nice change of pace.

6. Termo free · web · Portuguese

   The best-known Portuguese daily by a distance, and it is free to play in the browser: one five-letter word, six tries. One thing to flag if you are in Portugal: it runs on a Brazilian word list, so you will hit words and spellings that are not how we write here. Plenty of Portuguese players have grumbled about exactly that. It is still good. Just know what you are getting.

A few more worth a look

If you want to ease in, Dordle is the two-board version and a gentler jump than Quordle. If you like a puzzle that makes you think sideways, semantic guessing games ask you to find the secret word by meaning rather than letters, which is a completely different kind of frustrating. And for Portuguese players who want a European-Portuguese option online, Treta (a free daily in European Portuguese, with words from 4 to 7 letters) and AbraPalavra (a five-letter daily on the website of the newspaper Observador) are both worth a try.

FAQ

Keep reading: how to win in fewer guesses and how to keep a streak alive. Back to all guides.