Free on iPhone · no ads · no in-app purchases
Group chats have been doing this for years: everyone pastes their grid of squares, somebody claims they got it in three, and there is no scoreboard anywhere. The comparison is the fun part and it has always been done by hand.
Word War: Duel is a daily word game built around that comparison instead of around the puzzle. The puzzle is the familiar one: one word a day, six guesses, green and yellow. What's added is a result.
Send a link. Your friend plays the same word you did.
Fewest guesses wins the round. First to 10 rounds wins the battle. Best of five battles wins the war.
Teams average their members' guesses against the other team's average. That one rule changes the character of the game completely: it stops being about the one person in the chat who is unreasonably good at anagrams, and starts being about whether your side collectively showed up today. Somebody taking six guesses is survivable if four other people took three.
The word is the same for everyone for the whole day, so a friend three time zones away can play at breakfast and you can play at midnight and the round still scores correctly. Nobody waits for a turn. The only advantage to playing early is that ties break on solve time.
Every player has a Universe war running from the moment they install, so it is you against the average of everyone playing that day. It means the game works on day one, before you have talked anyone into downloading it, which is the part most "play with friends" games quietly get wrong.
Once a group gets serious about it, the arguments are always the same two. How do you settle a tie, and should this be a season? We wrote up comparing word puzzle scores and running a daily word puzzle league for exactly those.
Teams average their members, so the format works for a pair or for a large group chat. Bigger teams are steadier, because individual bad days matter less.
They forfeit that round. Battles run to 10 round wins and wars are best of five battles, so the format expects people to miss days and is built to absorb it.
No. Word War: Duel is an independent game, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Wordle or The New York Times Company. It is a Wordle-style daily word game, and that comparison describes the format. It is the only claim being made.
Yes. Free on the App Store, no ads, no in-app purchases. iPhone only for now.
iPhone · free