The best idea Wordle ever had was not the letter tiles. It was the calendar. One puzzle a day, the same puzzle for everyone on earth, and when the day ends the puzzle is gone. Cricket fans, who already live their lives on a calendar of series and seasons, took to that format instantly, and a small family of daily cricket puzzles has grown up around the sport. This guide reviews the ones worth knowing. One honest note before anything else: we build one of these games, the Daily Challenge at Play 16-0, and it sits at the end of this page. It is also the odd one out, because it asks for eleven answers instead of one. The reviews before it are written the way we would want someone to review us: fairly, and by what each game actually asks of your brain.
What is a cricket Wordle?
A cricket Wordle is any daily puzzle that hands every player in the world the same cricket problem, once a day, no replays. The genre borrows three design decisions from the original word game, and all three matter more than the tiles ever did. First, scarcity: one puzzle per day means the game never overstays, and missing a day actually costs you something. Second, community: because everyone gets the identical puzzle, the result is comparable, and comparing results is the entire fun of it. Third, the streak: a run of solved days is a possession, something you own and protect and occasionally mourn.
Cricket suits this format better than almost any sport, because no sport keeps score of itself so obsessively. A century from 2009, a five-wicket haul from 2014 and a strike rate from last season are all sitting in public scorecards, waiting to be turned into puzzles, and the cricket fan’s native tongue is exactly the kind of recall these games test. Every game below is built on that archive. The differences are in what each one asks you to do with it.
Which cricket Wordle games can you play right now?
Four guessing games have defined the family so far. They share the daily rhythm but ask genuinely different questions, and each one deserves a fair reading on its own terms.
Stumpd: the modern attribute guesser
Stumpd is the cleanest current take on the format. Once a day it hides a cricketer; you get six guesses, and every guess must itself be a real player’s name. The game answers each guess with attribute clues, telling you which qualities of your guess match the hidden player and which are merely close, so every wrong answer works like a flashlight sweeping the room. The player pool leans on the Indian T20 league, which makes it the closest cousin to our own database, and the deduction loop is genuinely satisfying: by guess four you are not guessing anymore, you are solving. A tight two-minute game that rewards the fan who knows squad lists cold.
Crickle: the generous one
Crickle hides a mystery cricketer and gives you up to twelve attempts to find him, with a suggestion box that autocompletes names as you type and clues that narrow after every pick. Twelve guesses sounds soft next to Stumpd’s six, but that generosity is the design: it makes Crickle the friendliest entry point in the family, the one to hand a fan who watches every match but has never kept a mental database of debuts and eras. You rarely walk away with nothing, and for a daily habit that matters more than difficulty purists admit.
Crickdle: the scorecard detective
Crickdle owns the best pure puzzle idea in the family. Instead of attribute clues it shows you a real match: the result, and one player’s performance in it, and gives you four guesses to name that player of the match. That flips the skill being tested. Stumpd and Crickle reward knowing who players are; Crickdle rewards reading what a stat line means, working out the era from the scoring rate and the ground from the total, which is the closest any guessing game gets to actual cricket judgment. Four guesses is brutal, and it should be: the clue is an entire scorecard.
Nurdle: the most literal cricket Wordle
Nurdle is the family’s straight translation of the original: five letters, six rows, classic green and yellow tiles, except every answer is the five-letter first or last name of a cricketer who has played serious international cricket. It is the version for people who loved Wordle’s letter mechanics and simply wanted the dictionary swapped for a scorebook, and its back catalogue of puzzles remains a lovely rainy-afternoon rabbit hole.
One honest caveat that applies across the family: these are fan-built games, usually one person’s side project, and they pause, change addresses and sometimes stop updating without notice. That fragility is part of the charm, but if a link above ever goes quiet, the format’s ideas live on in whichever successor the community builds next.
| Game | You are asked for | Attempts | The feedback |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stumpd | One mystery cricketer | 6 | Attribute clues after every name |
| Crickle | One mystery cricketer | 12 | Clues narrow with each pick |
| Crickdle | The player of the match | 4 | A real scorecard is the clue |
| Nurdle | A five-letter cricketer name | 6 | Classic letter tiles |
| Play 16-0 Daily | A full XI under budget | 1 | A simulated sixteen-match season |
How is a draft puzzle different from a guessing game?
Every game above converges on one identity. However clever the clues, the day’s work is to collapse a list of thousands of cricketers down to one name, and the moment you land on it the puzzle is over. A draft puzzle runs the other direction: it hands you the names up front, in the open, and asks you to construct something out of them. Eleven answers instead of one, and, this is the part that changes everything, the eleven have to be right together. A guessing game cannot punish you for a correct answer. A draft can: the right batter at the wrong price wrecks the rest of the XI, and two individually brilliant picks can still leave the squad with no death bowling.
The grading is different in kind, too. A guessing game checks your answer against a dictionary; it knows the answer before you start. A draft puzzle grades you by consequence: the XI you submit plays a simulated sixteen-match season, ball by ball, built from what those eleven player-seasons really did, and the verdict arrives as a win-loss record rather than a row of tiles. You can make no identifiable mistake and still lose a match to variance, which is a very different feeling from a grey tile, and closer to the sport itself than any letter grid can get.
The chart undersells the gap, because the eleven picks are not eleven independent questions. Each one spends from the same purse, fills a role the others cannot, and shifts what every remaining slot can afford. Neither format is better; they are different sizes of puzzle. The guessing games are a sharp two minutes with your morning tea. A draft is ten minutes of sitting properly with a problem. Most days there is room for both.
How does the Play 16-0 Daily Challenge work?
Once a day, at midnight IST, the Daily Challenge deals the whole world the same board: one franchise-season draft pool, identical for everyone, drawn from a database of 3,197 rated player-seasons across two decades of Indian T20 history. From that shared board you build a legal XI: eleven picks, exactly one wicketkeeper, at most four overseas players, never two seasons of the same cricketer, all inside the purse. Then the engine simulates your season, sixteen matches, and hands you the record.
The ruleset is deliberately a hybrid of the game’s two main modes. You draft on Expert’s tight 100 crore purse, but with Normal’s full stat table open in front of you, a pairing that exists nowhere else in the game. We wrote up why those two rules matter so much separately; the short version is that visible stats let everyone solve the same information, and the tight purse makes sure the obvious solution never fits. If you are entirely new to the draft itself, the complete guide covers the board, the prices and the season in one place.
| Rule | What it means |
|---|---|
| One board worldwide | Everyone drafts from the identical spin |
| 100 crore purse | Expert’s budget: the obvious XI never fits |
| Full stats visible | Normal’s open book: no blind picks |
| First attempt counts | The spin you get is the spin you solve |
| Resets at midnight IST | A fresh board every day, streaks for showing up |
| Daily leaderboard | Every record, ranked against the same hand |
The scoring summit is the same one the whole game is named for: a perfect 16-0 season. Most days, nobody reaches it. The daily leaderboard fills up with 13-3s and 14-2s and the occasional heartbreaking 15-1, and that spread is the point: it is the fairest comparison anywhere in the game, because for once nobody can say the other drafter got a friendlier board. We wrote a whole essay on why that one specific scoreline hurts the way it does, and the daily is where it hurts most honestly, because the puzzle demonstrably had better answers in it and the board shows you who found them.
Why does only the first attempt count?
This is the rule that makes the daily a genuine sibling of Wordle rather than just a game with a calendar. Wordle worked because the grid you shared was the grid that happened: no retries, no curated second run. The Daily Challenge keeps that honesty. You can open the board, study it, take your time over every pick, but the first season you finish is the one that goes on the leaderboard and into your streak. No mulligans, no quiet second attempt after a bad spin.
The rule costs us players on their angriest days and we keep it anyway, because it is what makes the leaderboard mean anything. A board you can retry until it behaves is practice; a board you get one run at is a competition. It also produces the specific morning-puzzle feeling the whole genre is built on: a little ceremony, a little fear, and a result you have to own either way.
Are these games free? Do you need an account?
Every game in this guide is free, ours included, and none of them involves money in any direction: nothing to stake, nothing to win but the streak. Play 16-0’s regular modes need no account at all; you can open a draft right now and simulate a season anonymously. The Daily Challenge asks you to sign in before you draft, for the same reason Wordle asked you to keep your streak on one device: a first-attempt leaderboard only means something if every attempt belongs to someone.
Questions people ask about daily cricket games
Is there a Wordle for cricket?
Yes, several, and they split into two families. If you want the literal experience, letter tiles and all, Nurdle is the direct translation. If you want the spirit of Wordle applied to cricket knowledge rather than spelling, Stumpd and Crickle hide a player and grade your deductions, and Crickdle hides a performance and asks you to read it. And if you want the daily-ritual structure applied to cricket judgment rather than cricket trivia, that is the draft puzzle. All five give you the thing people actually miss about Wordle: one shared problem a day and a streak to protect.
Can you play more than once a day?
The guessing games are naturally self-limiting: once you know the answer, the day is done. The Daily Challenge is stricter in one direction and looser in the other. Stricter, because your first finished season is your recorded score even if you immediately see the better XI you should have built. Looser, because the drafting itself never runs out: the regular Normal and Expert modes deal unlimited fresh boards, so the daily is the exam and the other modes are the nets.
What happens if you miss a day?
The streak resets, in every game in this guide, and that is not an accident of design. The streak is the retention mechanic, the thing that turns a puzzle into a habit, and it only has value because it can be lost. In the Daily Challenge a missed day has one extra edge: the board itself is gone. Yesterday’s puzzle is never replayable, so the XI you would have built for it stays an argument, not a result.
Do these games work on a phone?
All of them, in an ordinary browser, with nothing to install. That is half of why the genre works: the puzzle lives where the morning already happens, next to the news and the group chats. The draft plays comfortably on a phone screen too, stat table included, though it will cost you ten minutes rather than the guessers’ two. Budget for it accordingly: the daily is a with-your-chai puzzle, not a between-two-floors one.
Which daily cricket puzzle should you actually play?
Honestly: more than one. They stack, because they occupy different lengths of the day. If you have two minutes and a good memory for squads, Stumpd is the sharpest of the guessers, and Crickle is the kindest place to start the habit. If you read scorecards the way other people read headlines, Crickdle will make you feel seen four guesses at a time. If what you loved about Wordle was the letters themselves, Nurdle’s catalogue is waiting.
And when you want the bigger question, the one where being right eleven separate times is still not enough, the Daily Challenge resets at midnight IST tonight, same board for everyone, first attempt counts. The calendar was the great idea. Pick the puzzles that deserve a square on yours.