Worldle
When I first tried Wordle, I didn't like it. The answer to one of the first puzzles I tried was "abbey" and I was very annoyed by the double letter, which I hadn't known was a possibility. I have since figured out my preferred Wordle strategies and I try the puzzle most days.
Once I'm done with Wordle, I open up Worldle, one of the many Wordle-like puzzle games that appeared in the weeks following Wordle's explosive popularity. If you haven't encountered it, Worldle is a geography puzzle. You're given the silhouette of a country (or territory) and you have six guesses to identify it. For each incorrect guess, you're given the direction and the distance from the correct answer. For example, today my first guess was Yemen, which the game told me was 14,324km East of the actual answer and helped me make a more accurate second guess.
I like Worldle quite a bit, but I find its difficulty much more variable than Wordle's. There have been several days where I've identified the country immediately because it has a unique silhouette (Iceland) or because I've been there and so I'm particularly familiar with what it looks like (Indonesia). But there are other days when I can tell the silhouette is a tiny island, and I make some guesses and figure out that it's south of the Maldives, but hell if I can name any other islands in the Indian Ocean, and so I just have to type in random places that I know are wrong until I've exhausted my guesses. This can be frustrating.
However! It's also teaching me about countries and territories that I've never heard of before. My favorite part of Worldle is probably that once you've figured it out (or run out of guesses) there's a link to view the place on Google Maps. I've documented my love of geography in this newsletter before, so you know I always click that link. And then I tend to look around at the nearby countries or zoom in on cities with interesting names or click on large bodies of water. I spend a few minutes daydreaming about travel and imagining other parts of the world and thinking about how borders are silly, but cultural differences aren't. It's fun.
Have you tried Worldle yet? Does it sound like a puzzle you would enjoy? Would you have been able to identify the British Indian Ocean Territory??