I’ve been enjoying Shuffalo, a quick daily word game from the New Yorker that I can’t help but compare to the New York Times’s Wordle, which is so popular we publish hints for it every day. But it really feels like an improvement on a different New York Times game, Spelling Bee—quicker and with more useful hints.
What is Shuffalo?
Shuffalo lives on the New Yorker games page, with a different puzzle each day. For each day’s puzzle, you get a collection of letters that you have to form into a word.
First you get four letters, and you need to use them all to make a four-letter word. Once you do that, a fifth letter is added, then a sixth, and so on up to eight. Get that far, and you’ve won—but there’s also a bonus round with nine letters if you’re up for the challenge.
How to play (and win) Shuffalo
The letters you have to work with appear in a circle. It looks a lot like Spelling Bee, if you’re familiar with that, but in Shuffalo you can only use each letter once per word. Once you select a letter, it turns gray and unusable.
If you’re stumped, there are three ways to get your brain un-stuck:
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Hit the recycle button in the center of the wheel to shuffle the letters.
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Select a few letters that might go together (for example, E and R if you’re wondering about an -ER ending) and it will be easier to see patterns in the remaining yellow letters.
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Click the Hint button at the bottom of the screen. It will reveal one letter in the answer. You do not get to choose which letter it is.
I found that the first two tricks helped me get most words, but the hints were nice to have if I ever felt that a level was taking too long. There is no limit to how many hints you can use, although if you use a lot you’ll get “Baby Shuffalo” as your rank. A perfect game earned me a “Super Shuffalo.”
Note that you can enter letters into any part of the answer, not just type from the beginning like in Wordle. This is a great feature to use with the hints—maybe you get a C mid-word, so then you can try putting an H right after it and see what letters that leaves.
At the end of the game, you get a graphic that shows which letters you guessed correctly, and you can also get an emoji result to share with friends.
Left and top: a game where I used many hints. Bottom right: a perfect game.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/New Yorker
How Shuffalo compares to other daily word games
Shuffalo is a pure word game. You don’t need to know what the words mean or be able to group them according to trivia or wordplay, making it more focused than something like word-grouping game Connections or word search game Strands. You just have to put letters together to make recognizable words. In that sense, it’s a lot like Wordle.
I like this game a lot, because it reminds me of my favorite way to play Spelling Bee—as a one-word quickie. Spelling Bee is a New York Times game where you’re supposed to find as many words as possible in a jumble of seven letters, reusing letters as needed. But every day there is at least one “pangram” that uses all seven. Sometimes I open the app, and stare at it until I find the pangram. Shuffalo gives me that same experience, but with five increasingly difficult levels, and a helpful hint structure. I’m really enjoying it.
