Daily web games I am currently playing
I quit playing Wordle a long time ago. I do appreciate, however, that it seems to have kicked off a massive, normie desire for free daily web games, and that soooo many people answered the call and made weird ones.
I was a big fan of Squardle for a long time, but not very good at it; I also liked some of the weirder ones, like the ones where you would solve 100 or 1000 wordles at once. I was not such a fan of the games that would attempt to take the rules of Wordle and apply them to other things, like music, game screenshots, movie screenshots, and so on; those are just memory/domain expertise tests, not puzzles.
I'm now playing two pretty puzzly ones:
Raddle
Raddle is a riddle game! You get a "ladder" of words. Each one is the answer to the previous riddle... and a word present in the clue for the next. I find the clues engaging but pretty reasonable. They're a little easier than most NYT-style crossword puzzle clues.
I do appreciate that raddle allows you to complete the puzzles for previous days.
Clues by Sam
Clues by Sam is a deduction game about marking a grid of faces as either criminals or innocents. I gather that this is a genre of puzzle game, and that there are free and paid mobile apps that deliver pretty much the same experience. However... I looked at some of them and it didn't seem that many of them had well-localized english text. And Clues By Sam is free, and isn't an app, so I'm sticking with it.
Each puzzle has an intended solve order. This means that it can tell when you are guessing, and it will thwart you; if you try to mark a square that you have no clue basis to be marking, it will stop you even if you've guessed right. I do appreciate that the puzzle "knows" exactly what conclusions I am supposed to be reaching from each clue. There is no ambiguity. The language the puzzles use is not particularly idiosyncratic to the game. It feels very honest, as language-based logic puzzles go. I like it a lot!!
(I am also pretty good at it. I say this smugly. I am proud to be good at Clues by Sam.)
I have been playing these two daily for a bit. (I don't think I can sustain any more daily puzzle games.) I am glad to have finally found a couple of games that aren't simply testing me on my exhaustive domain knowledge of, like, 1990s thriller screenshots, or whatever. It's nice!!