Games like Waffle: daily letter-swapping word puzzles

The closest games keep Waffle's board. Swapcakes, Guess The Grid and Jumble on Greatest Games each scramble six crossing words, three across and three down, and give you fifteen swaps, with coloured tiles to show which letters are in place. Barter from Mind Loft uses six interlocking words too, with a budget of par plus five trades.

Others swap two letters at a time on a different grid. Crosswordle scrambles a whole small crossword, a 7x7 and a 9x9 each day, with a move limit. Reunion, from Merriam-Webster, has a Classic and an Extreme grid, marks letters green and yellow, and shows the average number of moves everyone took. Swapdle comes at four difficulties each day, from Easy to Cruel. Swapple, Tessera and Word Box ask for every row and column of a square to be a word, and Rowdle cuts the problem down to five rows where only the rows matter; Smartle on AARP Games does the same with any five valid words, but only for AARP members. The Boston Globe's Align asks you to line up ten words in a grid against time and swaps. Swap from the LA Times, PuzzleLab's CrossSet and Shuffled do the same with mini crosswords, so you also have clues or crossing words to lean on; Shuffled gives three a day. Gram Jam turns swapping into a clearing game: each word you make leaves the board, and you have 18 or 20 swaps to empty it. Hexaboo does something similar on a hexagonal board, where a new letter arrives every turn; its daily Mini-Boo has a swap limit.

Other games move letters in different ways. Slideword and Sladder Daily slide whole rows and columns, Typeshift, Word Slicer and Word Safe slide columns like a combination lock until hidden words line up, Queuedle pushes a new letter in from a queue with every slide, and SpellSlide, Ravle and Slydle are sliding tile puzzles with one gap. Pairdle Slide moves two-letter tiles around a themed board until its hidden words appear. The Times Lexica, for subscribers, has you slide letters back into a small crossword. Tiled Words and Tilerdle break a themed set of crossing words into small tiles that you move and rotate back into place. Flow Fit, an app, has you drop blocks of letters into a grid like jigsaw pieces until the rows and columns read as words. Word Shards moves three-letter pieces of words, Omiword moves tiles within their sectors of a square frame, and PIVOT, Cogs and Karat turn letters around pivots, blocks or rings. These feel more like a mechanical puzzle and reward planning a few moves ahead.

If you like Waffle as it is, start with Swapcakes or Jumble. If you want a bigger grid with a move count, try Crosswordle or Reunion. Puzzleship's Word Scramble is a gentler choice with six short puzzles a day. Every daily word puzzle we list is on the daily word games page (/daily-word-games).