News You Can Bruise for 2023 January 4 (entry 0)

Wed Jan 04 2023 14:04 Our Morning Games: In the year or so since Wordle became very popular, bringing along with it the more general online game model of "everyone gets the same quick game every day". Since then, Sumana and I have curated a set of games that we play together most mornings over breakfast. Many games have gone in and out of our list, and I figured the start of a new year was a good time to make some recommendations. I hope you find some fun with any or all of these:

• Framed: guess a movie from increasingly obvious stills.
• Artle: guess an artist through their artwork. I find this one very educational.
• Globle: guess a country via distance from other countries. This also has a new "capitals" variant.
• Flagle: guess a national flag as the arithmetic sum of other flags.
• Subwaydle: guess the trains taken on a trip through the NYC subway system (also available for a few other cities). This is mainly a Sumana game because I don't like the weird, convoluted routes it comes up with, as if for a spy trying to shake a trail.
• OEC Tradle: This was originally "guess the country from its exports" but it's currently going through US states.
• There are a lot of variants of Heardle (now owned by Spotify), which is basically "Name That Tune", but we enjoy Heardle Decades and TMBG Heardle (originally a Casey Kolderup project).

There are also two slower-paced games that we don't necessarily play every day:

• Redactle: guess the Wikipedia article by filling in blacked-out words.
• After spending a while playing Wordle, Dordle, Quordle, Octordle, etc. we spent quite a while with no Wordlelike in our rotation. (I actually have a separate post in draft form for those who are into the N-ordle series of games.) Recently we picked up Squareword, which can be played just like Wordle but which adds a surprising depth of strategy to the formula if you want to take it slower.