Free on iPhone · no ads · no in-app purchases
The daily word puzzle is the most social thing on your phone that isn't actually social. Everyone you know solves the same five-letter word inside the same 24 hours, and the only way to compare is to paste a grid of coloured squares into a group chat and argue about it.
Word War: Duel keeps that puzzle and scores it. Same word for everyone, six guesses, the green-and-yellow feedback you already know. The difference is that the result settles something.
Fewest guesses wins the round. Ties break on solve time.
A battle is first to 10 round wins. A war is best of five battles, so losing a day costs you a round, not the war.
Send a link. They play the same daily word you did, and the round scores itself. No scheduling, no turns, no waiting for anyone to be online. You both already had a word to solve today.
Your side averages its members' guesses against theirs. A team war is more forgiving than a duel, because one person having a terrible morning gets absorbed by everyone else, which turns out to be the version most group chats actually want.
You against the average of everyone playing that day. It runs by default from the moment you install, so there is always a real opponent even if nobody you know has the app yet. This is the honest answer to the usual problem with multiplayer word games: they need friends to be fun, and you don't have any in them on day one.
Nothing about the puzzle itself changes. It is still one word a day, six guesses, three minutes. What changes is that the result goes somewhere: a standing, a streak inside a war, a running score against a specific person who is also going to see it. If you already do the daily word out of habit, there is no new habit to build.
Two questions usually come next. If you want to get a group chat into it, we wrote up how playing a word game with friends works in practice. If you'd rather see the options first, there's a roundup of multiplayer word games that names five others and puts ours last.
No. Word War: Duel is an independent game and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Wordle or The New York Times Company. It is a Wordle-style daily word game, and the comparison is the fastest way to describe the format, so that is the only claim being made.
No. The word is the same for everyone for the whole day, so you and your opponent can play hours apart and the round still scores correctly. Ties break on solve time, which is the one place playing earlier helps you.
You forfeit that round, not the battle. Battles run to 10 round wins and wars are best of five battles, so the format is deliberately forgiving of a missed morning.
Yes. Free on the App Store, no ads, no in-app purchases, nothing to unlock. iPhone only for now.
iPhone · free