If you prefer puzzles to doomscrolling, here are 5 great games to check out

NEW YORK: Here are 5 games that will test your knowledge of geography, history, and the most obscure corners of Wikipedia. NPR hide caption.

Maybe you, like me, are a daily puzzle player. Maybe you like a Wordle, or a crossword, or one of the other entries from the New York Times puzzle empire.

So, with a tip of the hat to the people on Bluesky who helped me discover a bunch of games I love in the last month or two, I'm sharing a few games that I'm particularly enjoying these days, ones that are not NYT word games. (No disrespect to my original love, Spelling Bee .)

There are more, of course: the spelling bee game Beeswax , the word game Smush , the vexing Anthropeum , the movie games Framed and Cinematrix . Truthfully, I have more games in the "daily games" folder on my phone than I could ever actually play daily. But given a choice between puzzling and doomscrolling, I'll take the puzzles every time.

Any idea where Regina is? Do your best in MapTap 's daily geography game. Screenshot by NPR hide caption

MapTap is a very simple game. You are shown a 3D globe that you can rotate with your finger, but there are no lines dividing countries or territories. So you are just looking at the unmarked terrain of the world, and you are challenged to tap as close as you can to a particular named location. Maybe "London, England, U.K." You tap. It shows you the distance between where you tapped and where the place really is. You get more points the closer you are. There are five questions in each daily round.

This game can be genuinely humbling, because without those familiar borders showing, it can be difficult to even locate places you are very familiar with. (Without state and national boundaries, it always takes me a minute to precisely find even a place I myself have lived.) But what I love about MapTap is that as I do it, over and over, I actually get better at world geography, which is worthwhile and enriching.

NPR's Linda Holmes is a daily puzzle devotee. She recommends games that will test your knowledge of geography, history, and even the most obscure corners of Wikipedia.