Games like Letter Boxed: daily word chain puzzles

The closest relative is EdgeWords, a free app for iPhone and Android that plays Letter Boxed's rule on four shapes a day: a triangle of 9 letters, a square of 12, a pentagon of 15 and a hexagon of 18. You chain words, each starting with the last letter of the one before, until every letter is used, and par is the fewest words possible. Daily Logic, another free app, includes WordGlass in its set of six puzzles: words chained around a square, each starting with the last letter of the one before, until every side is used.

In the browser, Word Pizza keeps the last-letter chain: five words from the tip of the slice to the crust, growing from three letters to seven, scored on a global leaderboard. Lexigo, a Puzzle Society game on GoComics that needs a GoComics subscription, has you spell five clued answers through hexagonal letter tiles, each starting with the last letter of the one before. Wordcrawl from Puzzlebun chains words from the top left of a letter grid to the bottom right and asks you to use as many letters as you can, and every grid can be covered in full. FOREWORD, an iPhone app, builds five themed words from sixteen letter fragments, where shared tiles end one word and start the next.

Coil drops the fixed set of letters: it starts from one seed word, and each new word must share one more letter with the previous one than the last step did. Unlike Letter Boxed, it rewards a long chain rather than a short one, and turns are timed.

Two dailies play the chain in other languages. Buchstabenring from the Süddeutsche Zeitung is Letter Boxed's rule in German: chain words through a ring of letters, each starting with the last letter of the one before, until every letter is used, and every ring can be solved in two words. Like Letter Boxed it sits behind a subscription, in this case SZ Plus. Kelime Zinciri on Sosyal Vadi is a free Turkish chain: everyone starts from the same word each day and adds real Turkish words that begin with the last letter of the one before, so like Coil it rewards a long chain: your score grows with every word you add, and a hint button suggests a word when you are stuck.

Every Last Letter on PuzzleNook keeps Letter Boxed's goal of using every letter but drops the chain: you make any words you like from a five by five grid of 25 letters, and a perfect solve uses them all. It suits players who enjoy the planning side of Letter Boxed, where an awkward letter like an X decides the order of everything else.

If you want the puzzle closest to Letter Boxed without paying, start with EdgeWords: its square is the same size, and the triangle is a gentler warm-up. Word Pizza and Wordcrawl are the quickest to try, since they open in a browser with no download.