Recommendations for free phone puzzles to do together on the school run

[maryce1818]

My school run is about 20 minutes and we've taken to solving a puzzle or two on our way to school - we do it out loud together and its become a bit of a tradition now. We've tried a few apps on my phone, and settled on a daily Wordle and Countable most mornings, but it can get repetitive, and it can sometimes be over in a few minutes.

I'm looking for recommendations for other puzzle-ish things we can do together on the school run, ideally ones:

• that keep the kids brains active and engaged and wake them up (a little bit challenging is a good thing!)
• that are free (ideally without ads)
• works off a phone and are easy to solve together out loud. DS (6) is there to enter guesses.
• Bonus if its not just once a day.

Open question: does anyone else do this too?

Worgle - Wordle but 6 letters
Squardle - like Boggle (might not work well outloud though)
Alphaguess - finding the word of the day. Normal mode and a hard mode.
Sumplete - making rows and columns add up to totals. There's 2 daily ones but unlimited practice ones
Hangfive- hangman with 5 words connected by a theme
Wordiply - they give you a core 3 letter block and you have to think of the 5 longest words you can with those letters in

Sorry, most are one a day though.
There's also Onewordsearch, crosswordle and lettergrams but they dont really work out loud I don't think.

Nerdle - maths based. More than 1 a day.

Worldle - geography - might be too tough for a 6 year old.

Connections is a good one.

For one a day puzzles if you Google them and then put unlimited after it you can do them more than once. We do wordle unlimited.

I find this really sad that it needs to be on a phone and can't just be time to connect with your small person before and after school, chatting, timetables, spelling games, would you rather...? questions.

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Thank you all for your kind recommendations! I'm back now so I'll take a look at all the suggested games!

I thought I'd share my experience as it could be helpful to some: My SIL swears by getting her kids into puzzle books early (the type you buy at WHSmith near the counter) and took to completing a puzzle or two each night with her kids, including a game that was essentially a dupe of the countdown number game. With my DS having trouble keeping up in maths the countdown idea in the car was the first idea I took to - there are so many free versions of this game online, but I eventually settled on using a free app. That tradition quickly expanded to Wordle and we even have tried an idiom game which sparks some very interesting discussions (and makes you realise that most of our idioms are pointlessly weird).

This isn't a golden goose but I think something that involves using a bit of their memory has really gotten my kids brains revving (it's also had a good effect on my working memory, something I feel is getting worse over time). Honestly, worth a try!