6 best daily challenge games of 2024

There’s a lot to be said about taking some time to do a daily puzzle game like Wordle or The New York Times Crossword. Besides the pleasure of figuring out a tricky clue or getting the Wordle in one try (it’s only happened to me once), they’re a good, simple way to keep your mind limber. Unfortunately, word games aren’t for everyone, even if a daily gaming ritual is.

Luckily, the “daily challenge” format is increasingly common in some of the best mobile games out there, and quite a few console games, too. Whether you’re looking for more puzzles to start your day with, or you’re interested in something more action-packed, this list should give you plenty of games to try out, whether you’re using a tablet or a smartphone.

1 The Daily Puzzle

A personal daily newspaper dedicated to puzzles

If your main issue with The New York Times Games is there isn’t a wide enough variety of apps, then The Daily Puzzle might be for you. The app features daily sudoku, logic puzzles, and a variety of word games, including Honeycomb (which is a bit like the Times’ Spelling Bee), Word Search, Letter Grid, Nine Letter, and Word Wheel. All the games are presented with cute faux-newspaper styling that’s tastefully put together without obtrusive advertising.

You can technically download The Daily Puzzle and play any of its games for free, but the game does have a virtual currency that limits how many games you can play at a time by making you play games to earn it. Each game costs 20 coins, and you can pay between $2.99 for 600 coins or $19.99 for 6,500 coins. Alternatively, you can just pay $4.99 to remove ads and unlock the previous day’s puzzles.

I quite like all the games in the NYT Games app, but The Daily Puzzle makes for an excellent buffet of other options if you’re hungry for something less time-consuming than the crossword but more challenging than Wordle and its various clones.

2 Slay the Spire

Deck building and card battling that’s hard to stop playing

Growing up, I was hopelessly in love with Magic: the Gathering because of how cool the cards looked and how fun it was to use them in a duel, but I rarely had people to play against. My solution now is to play a game like Slay the Spire, which is one of the best card games you can play on Android. In it, you climb a virtual tower, battling enemies with a deck of cards you adjust and add to as you play and learn what works well together.

The Daily Climb is a unique version of the game’s tower map and enemies that’s updated every day, and you get one chance to complete it before it resets for the next day. If you fail, you’re locked out until the next day. I liked trying to complete my climb while I had my coffee in the morning.

It definitely takes more time than doing a simple word search, but I found it a lot more engaging than a word game. If you’ve played Slay the Spire on the dozens of other platforms it’s available on, still consider the $9.99 mobile version. It’s hard to beat the joy you’ll feel being able to drop into a great card game at a moment’s notice on your phone.

3 Really Bad Chess

The classic board game reimagined

Chess is a board game many people learn, but far fewer enjoy or master. Really Bad Chess might not change any chess skeptics’ minds, but it at least made me realize that, at its best, chess is just a logic puzzle. Really Bad Chess gets there by offering the most stripped down version of the game possible, where you and your AI opponent’s pieces are randomized and all you have to do is make or undo moves until you or your opponent’s king is checked.

The game offers a Ranked mode that gets more difficult as you play, but the Daily Board mode is even more fun. You get a new randomly generated Daily Board every day, sometimes with nightmarish setups where your board is mostly full of knights. The game itself is free to download, but features like multiplayer are locked behind a one-time purchase of $3.99. You can also purchase more undos to use in games for $0.99.

4 Cut the Rope Daily

Physics puzzles with an animated twist

The original Cut the Rope was a mobile classic. I remember when I first installed it on my iPod Touch, and for a good while after, it made it onto any phone I was currently using, whether it was an Android phone or an iPhone. Cut the Rope Daily is a reinvention of the basic physics puzzler, from a game with multiple worlds and levels, to a service that delivers them to you one day at a time.

Every day you get a new level to cut and swing your way through, hopefully using gravity and the different physics items in the game to get a piece of candy into a waiting monster’s mouth. I’ve found that this bite-sized approach to Cut the Rope feels a lot better than the original game. It was easy to get burned out and frustrated if you played the normal game long enough, but here you’re forced to consume things in bite-sized, manageable chunks.

The only wrinkle is that, while the app is free to download, it does require a Netflix subscription to play.

5 Knotwords

An intriguing mix of word game and sudoku

Crosswords, particularly those from long-running publications like The Washington Post or The New York Times, aren’t easy for everyone. Besides having to deal with obtuse clues, you also have to have a long-term knowledge of the quirks of the people building the puzzles, including the words they like to reuse, in order to get through a crossword quickly. Knotwords has proven to be my best antidote to that problem.

The game presents lines of overlapping and connected boxes that are broken up into chunks, with markings that tell you which letters can go in them, but not the order. Your job is to, essentially, solve anagrams and lay them out, spelling words as you go. Knotwords offers a monthly puzzle book where you can get your sea legs, and also multiple daily puzzles that get harder as the week goes on.

The whole game is elegantly designed and gives you a lot for free, but if you want even more puzzles and hints, you can unlock the complete game for a one-time purchase of $11.99 or pay for a yearly subscription of $4.99.

6 Dead Cells

Action platformer with a growing list of awesome weapons

A touchscreen might be a natural fit for slow-moving puzzle games, but there are plenty of good action games that have figured out how to make awkward touchscreen controls work. Dead Cells happens to be one, and it has its own Daily Challenge mode to boot.

Your journey through the roguelike action platformer involves facing off with enemies and picking up new weapons and abilities along the way, sometimes purchasing them with the items you find. The Daily Challenge randomizes the map, enemies, and boss, asking you to earn as many points as possible before facing the boss.

You can’t play the Daily Challenge until you face off against the main games first boss, something that took me an embarassingly long time to do, but it’s worth it to have that much more game to play. For $8.99, Dead Cells gives you a lot, and the game now has multiple DLC packs that add more enemies, bosses, weapons, and more.

Set aside some time to master your favorite game

If you’re happy with the daily games you get with your news subscription, then by all means stick with that. If you need more, though, there’s a world of other options out there that can give you the perfect excuse to take some me-time and beat one level, complete a run, or solve a puzzle or two.

Now, if you’re looking for something more involved than a game that can fit the length of your commute, but still requires some critical thinking, you might be interested in a tower defense game. Fortunately, there are plenty of those, too.