Games like Spelling Bee: daily letter puzzles to play next

The closest copies keep all of the Bee's rules: seven letters, a centre letter in every word, words of four letters or more and at least one word that uses all seven. The LA Times' Wordflower, Wordexo, Blossom Word Game on blossomword.com, PuzzleLab's Seven Letters, Polyword, the Irish Independent's Word Wheel and the Chicago Sun-Times' Word Flower all play this way in the browser for free, and each gives you the day's full list to work through. SpellBee and Pangram Game do the same in phone apps. Merriam-Webster's Blossom has the same seven letters and compulsory centre, but it stops you at exactly twelve words, so the game is choosing long, high-scoring words rather than finding them all. The Boston Globe's Word Flower is another free flower of letters, with hints and two weeks of past days.

Some change one rule. Hexes lets words be two letters long and shows emoji hints beside each missing word. Lode scores rare words higher than common ones. Spell Bee fills a small crossword with some of the words you find. The Hindustan Times' Word Flower lets you use each letter only once per word, and Smush gives every letter except the gold centre five uses for the whole day. The Times' Polygon and The Telegraph's Panagram are the British word wheels: Polygon needs a Times subscription and its minimum word length changes during the week, and Panagram has nine letters, with a free mini puzzle beside the subscriber one. The Daily Express and Daily Mirror Word Wheels are free British wheels with a compulsory centre and one word that uses every letter, nine of them in the Express. Letters·7 from doce.games puts three minutes on the clock, Pangramathon asks only for the day's three pangrams as fast as you can, and Petalgrams grows its flower from four letters to ten.

The hive also comes in other languages, each with its own word list. In Spanish there are El País' Heptagrama, La Nación's Panal de letras, Clarín's Lexi Reto and ABC's Rueda de palabras, a word wheel; in German, Spelling Hex on stern.de and Tagesspiegel's Wortagon; in Italian, Alveare on Cruciverba Lab and Corriere della Sera's L'Apegramma, which needs a subscription. Hive on GrySlowne.pl plays in Polish, Ordstjernen on VG in Norwegian and Ordhjul from Information in Danish, where each letter can be used only once per word. Puzzlega.me has a Japanese Spelling Bee built from seven kana. Letters·7 also has Spanish, German and Italian panels, Hexes a German puzzle, and Pangram Game French and German.

If you like the search more than the hive, try the letter grids. Squaredle hides every word in a small square you trace through, and The Bee Jar does the same on a honeycomb of tiles. Beat Me at Boggle gives you the day's Boggle board and the score its maker got on it, and SpellTower's Daily Tower has you clearing stacked letters. The New York Times' Letter Boxed, which also needs a Times subscription, is the paper's other daily letter puzzle: twelve letters around a square, used in as few chained words as you can. The Guardian's Wordiply asks for the longest word around a short starter, and Typeshift on Puzzmo slides columns of letters until every one has made a word.

To start, play Wordflower or Wordexo for a free copy of the Bee with its full word list, or Blossom for a shorter game of twelve words. For a harder search, try Polygon, Panagram or Squaredle.