Free word and quiz games

What makes a good word or quiz game

A good word game gives you a small set of letters or a short clue and lets your own vocabulary do the rest. You hunt for a word in a grid, guess one letter at a time, change one letter to make a new word, or squeeze every possible word out of seven tiles. A quiz game swaps the letters for questions and a clock, so the challenge is how much you know and how fast you can say it. Both work best in short rounds, which is why they suit a coffee break or the bus.

The word and quiz games on Kiloo are built on everyday words rather than obscure ones, and each has its own little scene, from a printer's desk to a beehive or a game show stage. Most have a daily puzzle that is the same for everyone that day, with a streak if you come back, and an endless or practice mode when one round is not enough.

Word and quiz games to start with

If you like a daily habit, start with Five Letters: guess the hidden five-letter word in six tries, and each guess shows green for the right place, amber for the right letter in the wrong place and grey for a letter that is not there. Crossword Mini is a five by five crossword that most people finish in two or three minutes. Word Ladder asks you to change one letter at a time to get from the word at the foot of a tree to the word on the treehouse door, and every rung has to be a real word.

For finding words, Word Search has forty-six themes and four grid sizes, from straight lines on eight by eight to all eight directions on fourteen by fourteen. Honeycomb gives you seven letters and asks for every word of four letters or more that uses the glowing middle one. Letter Scramble drops seven jumbled tiles and gives you two minutes to find every word of three letters or more.

Balloon Words and Word Rescue are the old letter-guessing game made gentle. In Balloon Words a wrong letter pops one of a fox's balloons, and in Word Rescue it drops a sandbag from a kitten's hot-air balloon. For quiz rounds, Lightning Quiz has a sixty-second round, ten-question category rounds and a Daily 10, while Maths Blitz throws sums at you against the clock, from adding inside twenty to percentages.

Typing, tapping and playing together

On a computer you can type in almost every game: type a word and press Enter in Five Letters, Word Ladder, Honeycomb and Letter Scramble, type a letter to guess in Balloon Words and Word Rescue, and type into the grid in Crossword Mini. In Word Search you click and drag across the letters. Lightning Quiz takes the keys 1 to 4 for its answers, and Maths Blitz lets you type the number and press Enter.

On a phone or tablet each game puts its own letters or buttons on the screen, so you tap the blocks, tiles or A to Z board and drag a finger across Word Search. Several games are made for two people on one device: Hot seat in Lightning Quiz, Duel in Maths Blitz, pass and play in Honeycomb, and a secret word that one player sets for the other in Balloon Words and Word Rescue. P pauses and M mutes in all of them.

Frequently asked questions