Four years ago, we declared that ingenious puzzle designer Zach Gage’s Knotwords might dethrone Wordle as our favorite daily word puzzle game. Well, here I am making the same claim again in 2026: Gage and his collaborators at the puzzle site Puzzmo have a new game out today, called Ribbit. Ribbit has something Wordle is sorely lacking: Frogs.
Ribbit is an anagram game. It gives you a grid of letters that are connected together, some to multiple other letters and some to just one. From the jumbled letters you have to trace lines that form words of four or more letters, and as the letters are fully used up they’ll disappear off the grid, turning into frogs. They are very cute.
For reasons I can’t fathom the frogs don’t actually ribbit each time they pop up on the puzzle board or when you click them, which almost feels like a betrayal of the game’s name. But they remain a much more satisfying reward than a row of green squares, especially because they get all bouncy when you finish off the whole puzzle.
There are a couple other wrinkles to Ribbit. It’ll reward you with a star when you find the longest word in the puzzle, which is worth extra points and also helps you hone in just a little bit on the size of the words that remain. A gauge keeps track of how many of the total words you’ve found, so you’re not just stumbling around until you’re done. And unlike in Wordle, there’s no penalty for tracing out a path of letters that don’t make a word and then letting go of your mouse or taking your finger off your phone screen; you can keep guessing until you’ve found all the words. There were 19 in today’s puzzle.
As has become standard with daily puzzle games, Ribbit also generates a shareable scorecard, which tracks how long you took to complete the puzzle and how quickly you found that star word, encouraging you to sniff it out quickly.
There’s also, tantalizingly, a puzzle within the puzzle. When you use up a letter and it turns into a frog, it can be one of four colors, and you can then click the frogs to “pop” them like you’re playing a match three game. (Don’t worry, they come back if you refresh the page). The order you use up each letter has some effect here, though I didn’t get it right on my first try.
“It’s based on how you solve the puzzle,” Gage posted on Bluesky. “It’s meant to be a secret. If you get really into it, there are ways to play that let you get a frenzy every day.”
A frenzy, eh. Those frogs better scream with joy once I figure Ribbit out.
As with other Puzzmo games, you can play today’s game for free, but dipping into the archive (which includes daily crosswords, mini crosswords, and half a dozen other game types) requires Puzzmo Plus, which is a $40 annual subscription. Much better deal than the NYT Games, especially since you’re supporting indie game designers and get this sick deck of cards from BoJack Horseman’s artist for free.
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