My thanks to Lex Friedman for sponsoring this past week at DF to promote Lex.Games, a collection of eight daily word games. Quoting from Friedman’s own description in the sponsored RSS entry at the start of the week:

I paid Gruber many thousands of dollars to run this ad for free games which themselves have no ads. Please keep reading.

The games:

Conlextions: Inspired by NYT’s Connections
Lexicogs: Solve crossword-style clues by assembling letter “cogs”
By a Vowel: A word jumble game with missing vowels
Six Appeal: Wordle with six-letter words

There’s also a daily Mini Crossword; a Full-Size Crossword; and Mind Control, which is a whole lot like Mastermind and not actually a word game at all; don’t sue me.

Oh, and if you only counted seven games here, the eighth is iOS-only. It’s called Letter Opener, and it’s my favorite.

I actually hate Letter Opener, because I’m terrible at games like that. Looking at the leaderboard, though, obviously some of you are really good at it. Six Appeal is more my speed (which is to say, like Wordle, it has no clock). But go ahead and download the iOS app and try Letter Opener. Maybe you’re a fast enough thinker for it.

So the basic pitch is that Lex.Games really is just a bunch of fun daily games that are free to play, without ads (let alone without annoying ads). But you can — and should! — pay a modest $20/year to subscribe to get access to extra games, leaderboards, and just to support a very fun and satisfying endeavor.