Fibble

Like other Wordle variants, Fibble’s twist is exciting to describe: it’s Wordle, but it lies to you. The big surprise with Fibble is that it ends up being a brilliant game in its own right, building upon Wordle yet feeling remarkably different.

Fibble doubles as a guessing game and a build-your-own logic puzzle. Because of the uncertainty introduced by the fibs, Fibble’s exploratory phase lasts longer than Wordle’s, and it’s not nearly as punishing if you enjoy making guesses mostly by intuition. The task in Fibble isn’t to rack your brain for a word meeting some exact criteria; it’s to come up with a word that hopefully has several properties, but don’t sweat it if you can’t get them all, because some of the letters are probably fibs anyway.

Once you’ve made enough guesses, there’s usually a point where the puzzle is solvable like a Sudoku grid, using your cross-referenced guessesThere is exactly one fib in each row. Deducing the fib gives you confidence in that row’s other letters. That confidence cascades to other rows. and your knowledge of the English language. Deciding whether you’ve gathered enough information to reach that stage is the trickiest aspect of FibbleGoing straight to your mental word bank while there are too many outstanding ambiguities guarantees a headache. Meanwhile, you want to be careful not to spend a guess just to discover something you could have worked out from the existing clues..

The predetermined starting guess is a nice touch that prevents optimal player-selected words from making every game feel the same.

The main thing I’ve found missing from Fibble is the shared experience built around the daily word. Everyone gets the same fib locations, but each person’s puzzle – and its difficulty level – is made unique by where the fibs land relative to their individual guesses.