Wordle is for dummies. Play this word game instead

It’s generally hard to know what my nine-year-old does at school, if anything.

Sometimes I want to sneak a GoPro onto his backpack and track him like a cat in the night.

“How was school today?”
“I dunno.”

“Did you do art?”
“Nah.”

“Did you do maths?”
“Nah.”

“Did you do science?”
“Not really ”

“Did you go to the library?”
[Shrugs.]

“Was it sports day?”
“Oh, yeah.”

“What did you play?”
“I dunno.”

“Did you eat your lunch?”
[Silence.]

“Was it a good day?”
“I dunno.”

“Cool, good talk, son.” And then I solemnly hum Cat’s in the Cradle to myself.

And so, it was intriguing when he came home one recent afternoon during the first week of the school year and mentioned that his teacher had introduced the class to a fun word game called Contexto. “You should Google it, let’s play it,” he said.

I don’t like Googling things. My kid’s always asking me to Google things. “Can you Google Mr Beast’s net worth?” he’ll ask. Or “Can you Google when the new season of Gumball is out?” Just ’cause I’m holding my phone, it doesn’t mean I want to use it. I’m busy scrolling, anyway.

And so I responded with the same enthusiasm I show anytime he asks me to Google something: “Sure, later.” Which is my way of saying, “Let’s just all forget about this Googling business.”

My partner, however, is infinitely more patient with these kinds of things, and she did Google it. It turns out Contexto is really good! My son is a genius with the taste of a Chloe Sevigny. I should Google things for him more often. (“Mr Beast’s net worth as of 2025 is $1 billion USD, making him one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires.” OK, good to know.)

It’s rare that kids learn something useful at school, let alone in the first week of the year. But as far as daily word games designed to distract us from death go, Contexto is the best one yet. I know this because every time I play Contexto, I end up with a concussion.

Contexto makes Wordle look like Play School. If you’re one of those people who proudly post their six-guess Wordle grid on the family WhatsApp thread, don’t even bother with Contexto. Contexto will make your temporal lobes itch. Contexto will decimate your soul.

It is delightfully challenging. While Wordle is out here causing outrage by recycling five-letter baby words like “CIGAR”, Contexto includes – more or less – all the words ever.

The aim of the game is to “find the secret word”. You have unlimited guesses to get there. Your only guide is your own previous guess and its approximate relation to the secret word.

For example, let’s say you guess “pancake” and you’re told that word is 62 degrees away from the secret word. This is a cause for celebration! You’ve narrowed it down so much! And yet you’re still four hours to three days away from solving this puzzle. (If you touch a thesaurus at any point, you should be ashamed of yourself.)

I have spent six days trying to figure out the word that unites “diner (15)“, “coworker (26)“, “cocktail (43)“, “buffet (46)” and “dance (74)“. Almost 100 guesses in, the puzzle still sits there unfinished, a testament to my puny little brain and poor grasp of the English language. What is the cocktail buffet these coworkers are gathering at? What is the stupid word you want from me, you magnificent puzzle!

For the connoisseurs, Contexto is essentially an improved version of Semantle, a game that’s been called the “Dark Souls of Wordle”. But Contexto is more appealing because it was created by Brazilians, and then perfected by robots.

According to the game’s creators, “Contexto is powered by an AI algorithm, based on GloVe from the Stanford Natural Language Processing Group (NLP).” Obviously, I don’t know what any of this means. But I think it means that, by playing the game, I am either training AI to think more like a human or AI is training me to think more like AI. Either way, the singularity keeps winning.

This (but mainly laziness) is exactly why I don’t like Googling things for my kids. Fun game, though. I guess school is still useful.

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