3. Find the Word

Just like Crosswords, Word Search is an old game that everyone knows. It’s a puzzle-type game where players are given a list of words to find in a grid of letters. Most of the time, the puzzles have themes, or the words on the list have something in common.

Word puzzles like these are also easy to change so that people of different ages can play. For example, kids’ puzzles tend to be smaller, and the words are only hidden in the grid vertically or horizontally.

The ones for adults are bigger, and the words can also be written backward or diagonally, which makes them harder.

4. Word Hustle and Wordle

Wordle is the newest digital word puzzle game that is about to take over the world. It’s a daily puzzle with easy-to-understand rules. After the New York Times bought Wordle, new versions started to show up on the internet. These versions had the same challenging parts that players love about Wordle, but they didn’t limit players to just one puzzle per day. To avoid stealing someone else’s work, these versions were given the name Word Hurdle.

The goal is to try different things until you find the 5-letter word of the day. At the start, there is a 5×6 grid. The players must start by putting in any 5-letter word at random. If the word you typed in has any letters that are also in the daily term, those letters will be highlighted in yellow or green, depending on whether they are in the right place.

The players can keep trying different combinations to find as many highlighted letters as possible, but they must be careful! They can only enter up to six words, and one of them has to be the winning word or they will lose the game.

5. Anagrams word games

There are many different kinds of word games in this group. It can also hold games like Scrabble and Words with Friends. But, unlike these, anagrams are usually played by just one person.

There aren’t many rules. The player gets a set of letters that are an anagram of several words. The goal is to find the letters by putting them back in order.

There are two kinds of anagram games that people like to play a lot. The first one is set up like a crossword puzzle, and the number of empty squares tells the player how long the words they need to find are. The second type is much easier. Instead of a crossword, the player has a list of how many words they need to make, and the length of those words is their only hint.

This second type is also the basis for other word games like Spelling Bee, which became popular as part of the New York Times puzzle games catalog. In this game, players don’t get a list of how many words they need to make. Instead, they see how many points they can get by putting the letters on a hive back in order. They have to find the words and figure out how long they are.

6. Semantic games

These are multiplayer games where a group of players must work together and compete against other groups. It’s not about the words, but about what they mean.

Mad Libs is a well-known game in this group. In it, the players are given a page with a short story in which some of the keywords have been changed to blanks with only a hint or clue, such as “verb, past tense,” “type of food,” “noun,” “name of the singer,” etc. Then, each group of players must ask the other groups to fill in the blanks without giving them any more information than the clue. The result is often stories that make no sense, are funny or seem strange.

Codenames are another well-known game in this group. Its goal is to figure out all of the other team’s codenames based on a word given as a hint by another player.

7. Cryptogram puzzles

Cryptogram puzzles are word games where the goal is to figure out a message hidden in a short piece of encrypted text. People often call them “ciphers,” but that name makes it sound like they can use both letters and numbers, but cryptograms only use letters and words.

Usually, the puzzles are turned into story games in which the player has to solve a series of cryptograms to find out about a secret, a murder, a treasure, or something similar.

8. Draw a picture

Even though it’s often forgotten when people talk about different kinds of word games, Pictionary is also on this list. Consider it. Its name comes from the words “Picture” and “Dictionary.”

It is a team game in which the two teams compete to move around the board and be the first to reach the last square. Depending on the color of the square they land in, one player on the team has to draw a word or phrase for the other players to guess.

These are just a few general types of word games. Each type could be broken down even more because each one has many games with very different rules and ways to play. Just use them as a guide or a place to start if you want to learn more about word puzzles and have fun with your language skills.

Check Quordle for more.