Wordle.gg review: a free daily Wordle in seven languages, done properly

What is Wordle?

Wordle is the five-letter guessing game created by Josh Wardle. You type a word, and each tile turns green for a letter in the right place, yellow for a letter that is in the word but elsewhere, and grey for a letter that is not in it at all. You have six tries.

Wordle.gg is an independent version of that game. It is not the New York Times Wordle and is not connected to it: the site states plainly that it is made by fans and that its daily word is different from the NYT answer. If you want to compare notes with friends who play the NYT puzzle, that matters. If you simply want a good daily Wordle, it does not.

The English edition accepts nearly 15,000 five-letter guesses, while the daily answers come from a shorter list of about 2,300 common words. That is the right balance: you can probe with odd words, but you will never lose to an obscure answer.

How a round plays

Rounds play exactly as you expect. Type a word, press Enter, and the tiles flip to show their colours. Words that are not in the list are rejected with a short message and do not cost you a row. The on-screen keyboard remembers every colour, so after three or four guesses it shows at a glance which letters are still in play.

Win and you get one of the familiar verdicts, from Genius for a first-try solve down to Phew on the sixth row. Lose and the game shows you the word. Either way the statistics panel opens with games played, win percentage, current and best streak, and a guess distribution bar chart. On the Daily it also counts down to the next word.

A small counter under the board shows how many players have finished today’s daily in your language. It is a nice touch: it tells you the game is alive without turning into a leaderboard.

Daily, Unlimited and seven languages

The Daily is one word, the same for every player, and a new one arrives at midnight UTC. Your streak counts consecutive days solved, and the share button produces the usual spoiler-free grid: a header such as “Wordle.gg #14 4/6”, the green, yellow and grey squares, and a link. Hard mode adds an asterisk, and a game played in another language gets its language code in the header.

Unlimited lives on its own page and gives you a new random word every round, with statistics kept apart from the Daily so practice never touches your streak. It is the best place to try new openers. If you only ever want the endless version, the separate Wordle Unlimited site is built for exactly that.

The language support is unusually thorough. Besides English there are German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch editions, each with its own word list, daily word, keyboard and stats. German gets a QWERTZ keyboard with Ä, Ö and Ü as real letters, French uses AZERTY and ignores accents, Spanish has its own Ñ key, and in Dutch IJ counts as two letters.

Difficulty and strategy

Difficulty sits where Wordle always has: most days are a comfortable solve, and every so often a word with a common pattern, such as an ending shared by half a dozen words, eats your last three rows. Hard mode turns that up. Any letter revealed as green or yellow must be used in every following guess, which removes the throwaway word that tests five fresh letters. You can only switch it on or off before the first guess of a round, so there is no flipping it off halfway through.

What could be better

The daily reset at midnight UTC is fair and simple, but it means the new word arrives in the late afternoon or evening across the Americas, which takes some getting used to. Statistics are stored in the browser, so a streak on your phone does not follow you to your laptop, and clearing site data resets it.

The other limit is by design. Because Wordle.gg has its own daily word, it cannot replace the NYT puzzle for anyone whose friends compare that specific answer. We would rather it was honest about this than pretend otherwise, and it is.

Verdict

Wordle.gg is a very good way to play Wordle: the rules are untouched, the interface is quick and readable in light or dark, and hard mode, a real unlimited mode and seven properly localised editions put it ahead of most fan versions. If one board a day is no longer enough, Quordle is the natural next step.

Wordle FAQ