How to Play “Shuffalo”: the New Yorker’s Response to Wordle
I love Shuffalo, the New Yorker’s quick daily word game, which I can’t help but compare to Wordle from the New York Times, which is so popular that we publish clues for it every day . But it actually feels like a better version of another New York Times game, Spelling Bee—it’s faster and has more helpful clues.
What is Schuffalo?
Shuffalo is featured on the New Yorker’s games page , where he offers a new puzzle every day. Each puzzle asks you to create a word from a set of letters.
You’re given four letters first, and you need to use them all to form a four-letter word. Then you add a fifth letter, then a sixth, and so on up to eight. Once you reach that limit, you win. But there’s also a nine-letter bonus round if you’re up for a challenge.
How to Play (and Win) Shuffalo
The letters you’ll be working with are marked with a circle. This is very similar to Spelling Bee, if you’re familiar with it, but in Shuffalo, each letter can only be used once per word. Once a letter is selected, it becomes grayed out and unavailable for use.
If you’re stuck, there are three ways to get your brain out of the rut:
-
Press the recycle button in the center of the wheel to shuffle the letters.
-
Pick a few letters that can go together (like E and R if you’re interested in the -ER ending), and you’ll find it easier to see patterns in the remaining yellow letters.
-
Click the “Hint” button at the bottom of the screen. This will reveal one letter of the answer. You can’t choose which letter to select.
I found that the first two tricks helped me solve most of the words, but the hints were very helpful if I felt a level was too long. There’s no limit to the number of hints, though using them often can earn me the title of “Little Shuffalo.” A perfect game earned me the title of “Super Shuffalo.”
Note that you can enter letters in any part of the answer, not just from the beginning, as in Wordle. This is a great feature for suggestions—for example, if you see the letter “C” in the middle of a word, try adding the letter “H” immediately after it and see what letters remain.
At the end of the game, you’ll receive a graph showing which letters you guessed correctly, and you’ll also be able to get your result as an emoji to share with your friends.
How Shuffalo is different from other daily word games
Shuffalo is a purely word game. You don’t need to know the meaning of words or be able to group them according to rules or wordplay, making it more goal-oriented than, for example, the word-grouping game Connections or the word-search game Strands . You simply need to arrange letters to form recognizable words. In this sense, it’s very similar to Wordle.
I really like this game because it reminds me of my favorite way to play Spelling Bee—the quick, one-word version. Spelling Bee is a New York Times game where you have to find as many words as possible in a set of seven letters, using letters as needed. But every day, at least one “pangram” appears that uses all seven. Sometimes I open the app and stare at it until I find the right one. Shuffalo offers the same experience, but with five levels of increasing difficulty and a handy hint system. I love it.