Words With Friends takes on Wordle with new single-player daily puzzles

By The Verge | Created at 2024-11-14 14:05:53 | Updated at 2024-11-22 15:47:15 1 week ago

The long-running word game is getting a handful of new modes that put it in direct competition with The New York Times’ gaming app.

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

Nov 14, 2024, 2:00 PM UTC

A photo of Words With Friends on a smartphone.

Wordle’s success has caused an explosion in newspaper-style puzzle games, and now Words With Friends is getting in on the action. The long-running word game is adding four solo modes that can be played daily, and they’ll sound familiar to those who use The New York Times’ gaming app.

The new games include a mini crossword puzzle; a word search; Word Wheel, which is about connecting letters to create words; and a word guessing game called Guess Word. You can see what they all look like in the gallery below:

A screenshot of the Words With Friends game mode Word Search.

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Word Search.

Image: Zynga

Zynga, which owns Words With Friends, says that each of the games will have new puzzles daily and can be played either solo or in multiplayer. “Our players asked if they could do even more, so we’ve added a whole new layer of personally fulfilling solo mini-games where you can disconnect from the world and play word games, with or without friends,” Yaron Leyvand, Zynga’s executive vice president of mobile games, said in a statement.

The news comes as plenty of different outlets are trying to replicate or build on Wordle’s breakout success. The New York Times continues to test new games, including a sports-themed take on Connections and a puzzler called Zorse, while the Hearst-owned Puzzmo is steadily building out an impressive library of games including recent releases like a weather-based version of sudoku. Meanwhile, Netflix is about to launch its own daily word game, and even LinkedIn has launched its own collection of puzzles.