It’s fine and dandy doing the Wordle daily, but if you’re looking for a real challenge, there’s now a Pokemon version to test your skills. Rather than trying to tease out a word, it’s a randomizer for the battle against Red that caps off Gold and Silver, truly testing your mettle for pocket monsters.
The game is rather appropriately called Daily Red, and it comes from a developer called AmiBuilds. The mechanics are simple: you start it up, and it plops you atop the mountain, right before you meet Red from the first generation for a climactic endgame fight.
This time, though, your team is made up of randomly chosen monsters from the first three generations. They’re all level 100 to make sure they can stack up against Red’s S-tier pocket pals, and from there, it’s up to you to make the win happen.
You could get lucky and have Charizard, Dragonite, and Entei and decimate your opposition, or you could get Goldeen and Caterpie and get completely rocked. It’s all in the RNG, and all players get the same team, making it all about your strategies and luck in battle.
Unlike Wordle and many of its clones and contemporaries, Daily Red isn’t immediately available in a browser. Instead, you download it from the developer’s GitHub, then go through a short setup process to get it running, after which you play it from your internet-surfing outlet of choice.
Making it work requires a bit of tech knowledge and following some instructions. I’ll be honest and the barrier to entry here could be off-putting, but once you get the game running, it’s quite fun. Probably worth noting it’s been vibe-coded, meaning the code was created using gen-AI.
It uses your PC’s clock to ensure you get only one shot every 24 hours, and the start screen displays your win-loss ratio, reminding you of your talents every day. Seeing the stats can be brutal, but if you’re going to be the best, like no one ever was, you need to be real with yourself, right?