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 that asks you to trace lines through a grid of connected letters to form words of four or more letters. As the letters are fully used up, they disappear off the grid and transform into adorable frogs. For reasons I can't fathom, these frogs don't actually ribbit when they pop up or when you click them, which almost feels like a betrayal of the game's name. However, 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.
A More Forgiving Puzzle Experience
There are a couple of other wrinkles to Ribbit that distinguish it from its famous predecessor. It rewards you with a star when you find the longest word in the puzzle, which is worth extra points and helps hone in on the size of the words that remain.
Key features of the gameplay include:
- Progress Tracking: 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.
- No Penalty for Errors: Unlike in Wordle, there is 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 the phone screen. You can keep guessing until you've found all the words.
- Shareable Scorecards: As has become standard with daily puzzle games, Ribbit generates a shareable scorecard. This tracks how long you took to complete the puzzle and how quickly you found that star word, encouraging you to sniff it out quickly.
Hidden Mechanics and "Frenzy" Modes
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.
Access and Subscription
As with other Puzzmo games, you can play today's game for free. However, dipping into the archive—which includes daily crosswords, mini crosswords, and half a dozen other game types—requires Puzzmo Plus. This is a $40 annual subscription.
This offers a much better deal than the NYT Games, especially since you're supporting indie game designers and get a free deck of cards from BoJack Horseman's artist.
