Written by the team behind Word War: Duel, a daily word game for iPhone
Everyone in your group chat solves the same word on the same day, and there's still no scoreboard. People paste a block of coloured squares, somebody says they got it in three, and the argument resets tomorrow. Here are the three ways people actually settle it, what each one is good at, and the things that quietly break a comparison without anyone noticing.
The default, and for two people it's genuinely fine. The grid tells you how many guesses somebody took and roughly how their luck ran, and it costs nothing.
What it doesn't tell you is time. A grid carries no timing information, so two people who both solved in four look identical even if one took twenty seconds and the other chewed on it through a whole commute. It also keeps no history. Yesterday's result scrolls away, which means the person who wins most often gets no credit for it and the person who lost badly on Tuesday never has to hear about it again.
Good for: two people, low stakes, no setup.
Breaks when: you want a record, or the group grows past about four people and the pasted grids start burying the actual conversation.
A shared note or a spreadsheet with a column per person and a row per day. It sounds laborious and it is, but it's the only manual method that survives a month, and it lets you settle on a rule everyone agrees with before anyone's ego is involved.
If you do this, decide two things on day one. First, what a miss counts as. Seven is the usual answer, since a fail is worse than solving on six. Second, whether you're counting daily wins or averaging guesses. Those two rules produce very different seasons, and the difference matters more than people expect.
The manual versions all fail in the same place, which is that somebody has to keep doing them. That's the gap we built Word War: Duel for, and we'll be upfront that this section is us describing our own game.
Everyone gets the same word each day. Fewest guesses wins the round, ties break on solve time, and the scoring runs whether or not anyone remembers to update a spreadsheet. A battle is the first player to win 10 rounds. A war is the best of five battles, so a bad Tuesday costs you a round rather than the season. Teams average their members, which is the group-friendly rule described above, made automatic.
You don't need to talk anyone into joining first. Every player has a Universe war running by default, which scores you against the average of everyone who played that day.
Different games. Every daily word game picks its own word. Grids from two different apps aren't comparable, no matter how similar the squares look.
Hard mode. If one of you is required to reuse revealed letters and the other isn't, you're not solving the same puzzle. Agree on this before you compare anything.
Time zones. Some daily games roll over at local midnight and others at a fixed global time. A friend abroad can be on tomorrow's word while you're still on today's.
Archive play. Somebody solving an old puzzle at leisure isn't in the same contest as somebody solving today's on the bus. Worth saying out loud once rather than discovering it in an argument.
If it's you and one other person, paste the grids and don't overthink it. If it's a group that's been arguing about this for months, either keep a real tally with rules you agreed on, or use something that keeps the record for you. We're obviously biased about which, and the honest version is that the manual methods work. They just need somebody to keep doing them.
If what you actually want is a contest rather than a scoreboard, we also wrote a roundup of ways to play a word puzzle against other people, including the games that do it live and the ones that do it a day at a time. And if the answer is a whole season rather than a single day, there's how to run a daily word puzzle league, which is mostly about the rules you set before anyone cares about them.
No. It shows guesses and tile colours, nothing about time. If speed matters to your group you need to record it separately, or play something that records it.
It's the common convention and it works, because it makes failing strictly worse than a six. What matters more is agreeing on it in advance.
No. Word War: Duel is an independent game, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Wordle or The New York Times Company. It's a Wordle-style daily word game, and that comparison describes the format. It's the only claim being made.
Free to download on iPhone, with an optional subscription.
iPhone · free to download