Forget Wordle, Canadian puzzle game Dayzle is my new addiction

I love a good puzzle, but in the era of the smartphone, I feel like few have managed to capture the feeling of sitting down with the morning paper and a coffee, and poking away at a puzzle.

Wordle came close when it took the world by storm in 2021, offering a great daily puzzle and a fun social system that made sharing your score (and competing with friends and family) an easy and fun element of the daily ritual.

But as much as I like Wordle, I keep falling off it, in part because I eventually get bored doing the same puzzle every day, and in part because one puzzle isn’t quite enough.

That’s where Dayzle comes in. This cool, made-in-Canada app offers a daily ‘set’ of five puzzles to complete, pulling from a broader list of almost 30 games.

That list spans several types of puzzles, including classics like Sudoku, word searches, and even its own Wordle clone, as well as novel puzzles like Terminus, Span, Crowns, and more. It makes for a wonderful amount of variety each day, which helps Dazyle feel fresh.

Daily set is ad-free

The daily set is the core focus for Dayzle, available for free with no ads. However, Dayzle also lets you run ‘practice’ puzzles to learn the different puzzles and improve on them without impacting your daily scores.

That’s where the ads come in, showing up every few puzzles. I found the number of ads more than fair, and they never interrupted my puzzles during testing. But for those who dislike ads, there are subscriptions (Plus for $14.99/year or Unlimited for $19.99/year) which remove ads and provide extra hints and lives. (Free users can refill hints by watching ads.)

What further helps the daily sets feel fresh is just how different some of the puzzles are. On the numbers side, Terminus and Span were among my favourites. The former has you building a route to connect a number of ‘stops’ in one line that doesn’t break or double back, while the latter has you joining islands with bridges, but you have to be smart about the connections since each island can only support so many bridges.

For word puzzles, I like Tumbler, which tasks you with transforming a word into another word, letter by letter. Loom is also interesting, offering a crossword-like puzzle with no hints. Witness is also clever, giving clues so players can rule out the suspects and find the real crook.

However, the visual puzzles are where things get really creative. Crowns has players placing crowns in colourful sections of a grid — each section has one crown, but crowns can’t touch, and there can only be one per row and column. Parcel has people dividing a board into squares and rectangles that match clues about their size, while Trailhead will have you building a trail based on simple clues.

And that’s just a handful of my favourites, with many other options available. Plus, several of the puzzles use a standard square grid, but Dayzle also offers more challenging ‘Hive’ variants that use a hexagonal grid instead.

Constantly adding new puzzles

Further, Dayzle has been steadily adding to the puzzles since I’ve been testing the app, including adding a few “relaxing” puzzles that don’t appear in the daily sets.

Finally, Dayzle offers a social aspect too, with leaderboards for the daily sets so you can see how your performance stacks up against others. Players can also earn medals and participate in events with friends. There’s also some self-improvement stuff here, with Dayzle measuring how players perform across statistics like speed, focus, or memory, highlighting improvements, and more.

All told, there’s a lot to like here, and the frequent updates are great to see. It feels like almost every time I open the app, there’s something fresh.

Part of how Dayzle pulls everything off, and at a fairly reasonable price, is through AI. The Toronto-based team of three behind the app told MobileSyrup that its sort of “core thesis” behind Dayzle was using AI to lower costs on the development side so it wouldn’t need to monetize as aggressively.

The team uses AI to help with coding, generating ad content, animating things, and more, while the human element comes more from managing the product and making decisions.

Dayzle is available for free on iOS and Android, as well as on the web if you’d rather try without downloading anything first. The free version is supported by ads, with Plus ($14.99) and Unlimited ($19.99) annual subscriptions available to remove ads and add extras like more hints and lives.

Screenshots credit: Dayzle