How to play Waffle — a free daily word-swap puzzle

Waffle takes a well-loved twist on the daily word game — a lattice of six words you rearrange rather than a single word you type — and keeps it deliberately simple. There is a new grid every day, shared by everyone, so you can compare how neatly you each untangled it. When the daily puzzle is done, an unlimited practice mode deals fresh, solvable waffles whenever you want more, and a dated archive lets you revisit grids you missed. Every practice board is generated the same way as the daily one — six interlocking words, checked so the scramble can be untangled inside the budget — so the challenge never softens when you play on.

Three things set the tone. First, it is free — there is no paywall and no premium upsell. Second, it asks for no account: your streak and statistics live in your own browser, so you can start the moment the page loads without handing over an email address. Third, the interface is quiet — type-set tiles, a tidy result panel you can copy as plain text, and zero emoji anywhere in the experience.

It is also built to be read by everyone. Every tile carries a small glyph as well as a colour — a check, a dot or a bar — so the feedback never depends on colour alone, a detail that matters for the roughly one in twelve men who are colour-blind. The whole board renders before any script runs, so it works on a slow connection and is fully keyboard-operable, with arrow keys to move between tiles and Enter to pick one up.

The day’s grid is the same for every player and rolls over at midnight in your own time zone. Restore all six words and your streak ticks up; come back tomorrow to keep it alive. When you finish, you can copy a plain-text summary — your swap count and star rating, without spoiling the words — and paste it to friends. Because there is no timer, nobody is pushed to rush; Waffle rewards a careful read of the board over raw speed.

Waffle is played on a 21-tile grid — a 5×5 square with the four inner cells removed, which leaves the waffle’s familiar lattice of tiles and gaps. Six five-letter words hide inside it: three across on the top, middle and bottom rows, and three down on the first, middle and last columns. Wherever an across word crosses a down word — at each of the nine corner cells — the two words share that letter, so all six are knitted together into one interlocking whole.

That lattice is the whole idea. Because a corner tile is read by two words at once, no word stands alone: the letter that finishes one across word is also the letter that starts, ends or anchors a down word crossing it. Twelve tiles sit on just one word — the cells between the corners — while the nine corners each carry two, which is why they do the most work and cause the most trouble. Keep that geometry in mind and the feedback below reads like a map rather than a wall of colour.

The tiles arrive scrambled, and your job is to put them back by swapping pairs. Pick one tile, then a second, and the two trade places. After every swap, each tile is scored against the word running through it — and, at a corner, against both words — by colour and a matching glyph:

Correct spot — jade tile with a check glyph: the right letter in its final home. This tile is locked; leave it alone.

Present — amber tile with a dot glyph: the letter belongs in that row or column, but in a different cell along it.

Absent — slate tile with a bar glyph: the letter does not belong in that word at all.

Two details are worth knowing. Because each corner sits on two words, it takes its best status from the two — a corner shown green is home for both the across and the down word at once. And letters can repeat within a line, with duplicates scored exactly, so an amber tile is a hint about a letter, not a promise about every copy of it.

You have 15 swaps in all, and the fewer you spend, the more stars you keep: a clean solve in ten swaps or fewer holds all five stars, and each swap beyond ten trims one. You win the moment all six words read correctly — and because there is no timer, Waffle rewards careful deduction over speed. If you get stuck, a Hint makes one guaranteed-correct swap, Show solution reveals the whole waffle, Reset rebuilds the start, and New puzzle deals a fresh one.

Suppose the top row’s hidden word is CRANE, and the tiles currently sitting in that row read C·R·N·A·E. The top-left tile is also a corner — it starts the word running down the first column. Here is how the row would score:

C, R and E turn jade with a check — correct letters in their correct places. Trust them, and never swap them away. The leading C is a corner, so that green counts twice: it is also the first letter of the word coming down column 1, home for both words at once. That is the tile you protect above all.

N and A turn amber with a dot: both belong in this row, but each is in the other’s cell. Read together, the amber pair points to a single fix — swap the N and the A with each other, and both land home in one move, completing the row.

Now picture the opposite. If that corner had held a stray Q, it would show a slate bar in the top row and a slate bar in the word running down column 1 — one wrong tile bruising two words at once. That is exactly why corners are worth fixing before anything else, a theme we pick up in the strategy guide.

Waffle borrows Wordle’s famous colour scoring — green, amber, grey — but the game underneath is a different animal, and it is worth being plain about how. In Wordle you type fresh guesses to close in on one hidden word; in Waffle you swap tiles already on the board to restore six words at once. One is a game of choosing what to guess; the other is a game of choosing what to move.

duplixo’s Waffle is an independent implementation built from original code — our own generator, scorer and solver — not a copy of anyone’s product. What we have kept is the free, no-account, colour-blind-friendly spirit; what we have added is unlimited practice and a dated archive. The table below lays out the practical differences.