Games like Worldle

Worldle takes a minute, and then there is a whole day before the next one. These are the games people move on to, what each of them actually tests, and where they differ.

What Worldle does well, and what it leaves out

Worldle shows you a country outline and gives you six guesses, reporting distance, direction and a proximity percentage each time. It is close to perfectly designed for the thing it does, which is testing whether you can recognise a shape and then reason about where it sits.

The gap it leaves is everything that is not a shape. A country outline says nothing about what a place is like, and it stops at the national border, which means the roughly four and a half thousand cities in the world with over a hundred thousand people never come into it. Most of the games below are attempts on one or the other of those gaps.

How to pick one

If you want more of the same reasoning, Globle and Travle both work on countries and both reward a decent mental map. If you want something that teaches you a subject rather than testing what you already know, Tradle is the pick. If you want to go deeper rather than wider, GeoGuessr is a different order of game and will take an hour instead of a minute.

If what you liked about Worldle was the daily shared puzzle rather than the outlines specifically, a city-level game changes the reasoning more than another country game will.

The games

Game What you guess Level
Worldle Guess the country or territory from its outline. Six guesses, with distance, direction and a proximity percentage after each one. Country
Globle Guess the mystery country. Each guess colours that country on a globe by how near it is, so the map warms up as you close in. Country
Tradle Guess the country from a treemap of what it exports. The most educational of the set, and the hardest if you have never looked at trade data. Country
Travle Get from one country to another by naming the countries in between. Tests borders rather than shapes. Country
Flagle A flag revealed a few tiles at a time. Pure recall rather than reasoning. Country
GeoGuessr Dropped into Street View somewhere in the world with no clues but the view itself. The deepest of them, and the only one that really needs an account and a subscription. Anywhere
Metrojithis site Guess the city from five emoji. The clue is cultural rather than geometric: landmarks, food, industry, weather and history. City

Questions

Is Worldle the same as Wordle?
No. Wordle is the New York Times word game. Worldle is an independent geography game that borrowed the format and the six-guess structure.
Are these games free?
All of them except GeoGuessr, which has a limited free tier and a subscription for everything else.
Do they all reset daily?
Worldle, Globle, Tradle, Travle, Flagle and Metroji all give the same puzzle to everyone and change once a day. GeoGuessr can be played continuously.

Today's city

Five emoji, six guesses, one city. Free, no account, and the same puzzle for everyone in the world today.

Play Metroji See past cities