The best online games and puzzles you can play daily in 2024

One of The New York Times’ more recent word games online, Connections was an instant hit when it first launched. The game presents you with a grid of 16 cards. Each usually has a word written on it but this can also be a single letter, a number or, in the case of an April 1 game, emoji.

The aim is to find out how to categorize the cards into four groups. There’s only one correct answer, and the groups tend to be of varying difficulty, ranging from the yellow group (for instance, metal elements or types of flowers) to the purple (homophones for names of philosophers or what the letter “O” might mean).

There’s no timer, but you can only make three incorrect guesses before you lose and the answer is revealed. I’ve played every single day since the game debuted and while it’s always nice to get a perfect game with no mistakes, having a long winning streak is very satisfying. My best so far is 32 victories in a row. — Kris Holt, Contributing Reporter

Framed is one of the earliest and best Wordle clones. It’s a simple enough concept: You’ll see up to six stills from a movie ranging from obscure to more obvious, and your task is to figure out which film they’re from. You get one guess per still.

The answer field has a helpful autocomplete function, so if you don’t know the full name of the movie you can still win. A built-in stat tracker is handy too. Framed is a way for film buffs to show off their knowledge, or perhaps get egg on their face when they somehow fail to recognize one of the most popular movies of all time. It’s good fun either way, especially for the Letterboxd fanatics out there. — K.H.

Box Office Game tasks you with guessing the five highest-grossing movies from a given weekend. You see each film’s distributor and gross revenue by default, but you can spend from a points bank to unveil additional clues, such as its lead actors, director, tagline and the like. The goal is to guess each flick with as little info as possible — though, really, this isn’t the kind of thing where “winning” is the point. (At least, that’s what I tell myself.)

Instead, for film freaks and people who spend too much time on Letterboxd, the fun is in discovering just how deep your well of movie memories stretches. Much of the time, it won’t be far at all. Other days, you might be amazed at just how readily you can recall Gone in 60 Seconds despite only seeing it once 20 years ago. If nothing else, all of this is a good way to brainstorm ideas for your next movie night. — Jeff Dunn, Senior Reporter

Costcodle is like a cross between Wordle and The Price is Right. Each day it gives you a different product from Costco’s enormous food database, and you get six attempts to guess its price. You can usually finish it in a matter of seconds, so it’s mostly empty calories, but it’s a fun way to check just how much information you’re retaining while combing the aisles of your grocery store. You wouldn’t think it’d be possible to enjoy guessing how much four bags of organic brussel sprouts cost, but such is the power of killing time on the internet. — J.D.

Here’s something very different from the other entries on this list. Coffee Golf is actually a video game (free on iOS and Android). As the name suggests, you can finish your daily run while sipping a hot morning beverage. Every day, there’s a new five-hole course set on an open landscape for you to play. You can complete it in any order, but the aim is to score as few strokes as possible, so planning your route is as important as nailing your shots.

I enjoy playing Coffee Golf early in my day because it gets my brain starting to work in different ways than if I only played the word-based games on this list. I have to look around the course and strategize a bit before starting my round. It’s been a fun addition to my daily routine, and it certainly beats doomscrolling while having my first cup of joe. — K.H.

While it might not help you become entirely fluent in a language by itself, Duolingo is a very useful way to learn handy phrases just by checking in and taking a two-minute lesson every day. The more you practice, the better, obviously. I imagine my French would be at a much higher standard if I did more than one lesson a day, but there’s not much I can do about that if I run out of hearts, which happens often. (I could pay for the premium plan, but eh.)

The gamification of Duolingo helps make it sticky enough to return to on a daily basis — the many, many emails and notifications you’ll get if you don’t turn those off will push you toward checking in as well. Those have all helped me maintain a streak of over 600 days, with maybe only a dozen streak freezes used in that time. (Hot tip: if you miss a lesson, you can change the date on your phone or computer to back to the previous day and help maintain your streak.)

Duolingo can’t really compete with more intense language learning methods like full immersion or taking a class a couple of times a week. But as a way to help you grok some of the basics before taking a trip to Paris or Quebec, or to refresh your memory on all the Spanish you may have forgotten since high school, it’s a decent option that doesn’t require a hefty time investment. And, hey, it can be pretty fun too, especially when the app lets you play a mini-game instead of basic text translation. — K.H.

The New York Times Mini crossword turned 10 years old in 2024. While many fans of the newspaper’s classic main crossword turn their nose up at the Mini, the itty bitty puzzle has endured for those passionate about word games online. It has a die-hard community of fans, many of whom try to race through it as quickly as possible.

The Mini has a five-by-five grid most days with between three and five clues in each direction. Puzzles on Saturdays and occasionally other days are larger, usually with a seven-by-seven grid. It’s a crossword, at the end of the day, so it doesn’t require much explaining. Thankfully, it’s rare to see a rebus (which allows the constructor to include a word or several letters in a single square) in the Mini.

I try to beat the standard puzzle in less than a minute. There aren’t many better feelings in playing daily games than when you figure out all of the Across clues in the first pass. My personal Mini record stands at 14 seconds. How about yours? — K.H.

Tradle belongs to the third- or fourth-order clones which bear so little relation to Wordle as to make the similar naming convention essentially false advertising. For this and other reasons, I love it. It only hints at a relationship to Wordle in so far as both involve guessing things and then receiving abstruse feedback on the accuracy of the guess.

Tradle — a game which was briefly addictive to myself and sent several members of my friends’ Discord server — provides only a gross domestic product, and a colorful visualization of what types of products account for that GDP (it sort of resembles hard drive disc space analyzers.) Where guesses in Wordle are rewarded by confirming the presence and potential position of letters, Tradle gives the distance to, and approximate direction of, the correct country from the incorrectly guessed one.

Occasionally the solutions are complete bullshit: I mean, sincerely, who besides the estimated 2,100 people living there has ever heard of Norfolk Island? But even failing the puzzle results in learning something cool — for instance, the existence of the self-governing Australian territory of Norfolk Island. — Avery Ellis, Deputy Editor

Now for something a little different to add to your rotation. Pile-Up Poker is a relatively new kid on the block, but it’s already the most-played game on the Puzzmo (Really Bad Chess, SpellTower) platform on a daily basis.

The aim is to place as many high-scoring poker hands as you can on a four-by-four grid. In each of the four draws you get per game, you get five cards and you can place four of them anywhere on the grid. The remaining card goes to a discard pile. Each row and column counts as a hand, as do the four corners. If all nine of those are valid, the discard pile is counted as a hand too. The more valid hands you play, the more your multiplier stacks up to boost your total score, which is given as a dollar value. You can play up to five games (or deals) a day.

You can compete to earn a top spot on the leaderboards, but there’s a neat community aspect to Pile-Up Poker too. The Puzzmo team has been unveiling some fun extras as the players collectively hit shared poker pot milestones. The next target is a whopping $1 trillion in total winnings. — K.H.

The true titan of online daily games, players made 4.8 billion attempts to solve Wordle in 2023. The game, which you can play on The New York Times website and Games app for free, follows a simple format. You have six chances to guess a five-letter word. Gray letters aren’t in the word. If a letter is yellow, it’s in the word but you have it in the wrong spot. Green letters are right where they’re supposed to be.

Making it easy to share an emoji-friendly colored grid of these guesses in group chats and on social media helped Wordle become incredibly popular. A tidal wave of clones quickly showed up, many of which appear on this list, but Wordle is still a fun way to give your brain a quick workout every day. — K.H.