Multi-word guessing games

These dailies share one scoring idea. Type a five-letter word, get a color per letter: right spot, in the word, or not in the word. What changes from game to game is how many hidden answers one guess has to serve, and how the results are laid out.

More answers means more tries, but a guess that helps one answer can waste a row on another. Past two boards, a lot of the work is bookkeeping: which keyboard letter is dead on which board.

Wordle, from The New York Times, is the baseline: one hidden word, six tries, one board. Hard mode is a setting on that same game. Letters you have revealed must be reused in later guesses. It does not add a second word.

Dordle uses two boards and seven rows. Xordle uses one board, eight tries, and two words that never share a letter. Dualword uses one board, eight tries, and a split tile where the top half is word one and the bottom half is word two.

The two one-board games are not the same puzzle. Xordle makes you work out which word a clue belongs to. Dualword tells you, and lets the words share letters. The Dordle vs Dualword guide walks through all three.

Quordle, now hosted by Merriam-Webster, gives you nine guesses for four words in its Classic mode, with other modes that change the count. Octordle gives you thirteen guesses for eight words.

Both are boards in a grid, each colored against its own answer. The reading cost grows with the board count. The deduction per board is the same as the one-word game.

If you want more information per guess without more boards to scan, the one-board two-word games are the middle of this list. Dualword is the one where the tile itself tells you which word each result belongs to.

Play free in the browser at dualword.swizzleworks.com. No account. Today's pair is on your device, so it works offline.

Rules for the other games were read from their public pages on October 24, 2026: nytimes.com for Wordle, the itch.io Dordle game, xordle.org, and the Merriam-Webster pages for Quordle and Octordle. We did not playtest the others for this page. Dualword rules are from the game we ship.