A bunch of my friends have a routine of playing a whole host of wordle variants daily. It's been amazing to watch.
dordle/quordle/octordle: Play 2, 4, or 8 boards at once. I find quordle to be the sweet spot.
xordle: Just one board but two secret words. A more puzzley feel. I made this one.
squardle: Sort of a crossword of wordles doing 6 at a time. Your feedback has some spatial meaning rather than all the puzzles and hints being done in parallel.
semantle: Guess the word based on similarity of meanings rather than spelling.
worldle: Guess the country/territory by its shape.
chessle: Chess opening moves.
ordsnille: Swedish wordle. I don't know Swedish but I do this one, using 5 letter words I find on the page then guessing plausible words. I'm slowly building up a valid word list by playing.
So I think even if the NYT acquisition is distasteful to you, maybe Wordle still is an example of nice things we can have.
I think it is so cool how the popularity of Wordle has opened the door to so many games that expand on the concept. It is like it created a shared expectation for how games like this can work that has now been adapted and expanded by so many different creators. I don't think any of the variants would be as popular without the original being as culturally prevalent as it is.
If you want to try one more I made squareword (https://squareword.org) which features a 5x5 grid of letters, featuring five words down and five across. Like a combination of sudoku and Wordle.
One small feedback on squareword: it'd be very nice to do some word pruning a la Wordle to exclude rarer words that the average person is unlikely to know (or have any exposure to), like today's first row, 4th column, and 5th column. IMO brute-forcing words until you get a word you've never even seen before isn't very fun.
There are a bunch of lists out there for these variants. I wrote a small one as a weekend project to learn React and AWS. People seem to like it since I've only shared it on my personal FB and it's getting hundreds of hits a day. I'll plug it here since you seem like an "rdle" lover.
want to add one more? I've been making a clone that isn't different from the base experience but focuses on challenging friends instead of the once a day thing.
sedecordle (https://www.sedecordle.com/) - 16 at once. I think I'd like this if I could open it on a big screen and see all the words side by side, but as it is there's too much scrolling. I agree that quordle's the sweet spot.
dordle/quordle/octordle: Play 2, 4, or 8 boards at once. I find quordle to be the sweet spot.
xordle: Just one board but two secret words. A more puzzley feel. I made this one.
squardle: Sort of a crossword of wordles doing 6 at a time. Your feedback has some spatial meaning rather than all the puzzles and hints being done in parallel.
semantle: Guess the word based on similarity of meanings rather than spelling.
worldle: Guess the country/territory by its shape.
chessle: Chess opening moves.
ordsnille: Swedish wordle. I don't know Swedish but I do this one, using 5 letter words I find on the page then guessing plausible words. I'm slowly building up a valid word list by playing.
So I think even if the NYT acquisition is distasteful to you, maybe Wordle still is an example of nice things we can have.