Is Try Hard Guides Worth It?

If you've ever searched for today's Wordle answer, a crossword clue you couldn't crack, or a working Roblox code at 11pm, there's a high chance you landed on Try Hard Guides. I wanted to know if the site actually earns its traffic, so I spent two weeks using every major tool, cross-checking answers, and reading through the founder's story. Here's the unfiltered breakdown.

What Is Try Hard Guides?

Try Hard Guides is a gaming and puzzle reference site that answers one specific question very well: "I'm stuck right now, what do I do?" Whether that means today's Wordle hint, a four-letter crossword clue, a Blox Fruits code that hasn't expired, or a quick verdict on whether a new indie release is worth $20, the site treats every page as a fast-answer destination rather than a long-form magazine piece.

The site launched in 2021 and has grown into one of the busier gaming utility hubs on the open web. It sits in an unusual spot: not a forum, not a wiki, not a traditional review outlet, but a hybrid of all three. The pages I land on tend to load fast, get to the point inside the first two sentences, and stay structurally consistent across thousands of guide pages.

Core areas it covers

During my fortnight of use, the four pillars I kept returning to were word puzzles (Wordle, Connections, Contexto, 7 Little Words), crosswords (NYT, NYT Mini, LA Times, Daily Themed), Roblox codes and walkthroughs (Blox Fruits, Blade Ball, Anime Champions Simulator, and dozens more), and original game reviews syndicated to OpenCritic and Metacritic.

Who Runs Try Hard Guides

The founder is Shaun Savage, a long-time web developer who previously built Pro Game Guides and Hearthstone Top Decks. According to the Google Publishers case study on his work, Savage briefly retired before deciding he wasn't done, Try Hard Guides was the site he came back to build. His stated mission is plain: "create a site that was simple and straightforward and got people answers to their questions right away."

That philosophy shows up everywhere. There are no autoplay videos at the top of every page, no five-paragraph introductions before the actual answer, and comments are kept open (a deliberate community choice that most algorithm-chasing publishers have abandoned). The site also belongs to a small network alongside Temptalia (beauty), Video-Gaming.com, and Goodest Pups (pets), which gives me confidence that this isn't a fly-by-night content farm.

The editorial roster is real. The byline I see most often on crossword pages is Christine Mielke, and the game reviews are written by a team that publishes consistently enough to have earned its way into OpenCritic and Metacritic's outlet listings, something content mills don't get accepted into.

Everything the Site Covers

The top navigation on tryhardguides.com is split into seven dropdowns: Answers, Reviews, Wordle, Crosswords, Codes, Roblox, and Tools. I'll work through each, but the structural takeaway is that everything funnels into one of three job-to-be-done buckets.

1. Answer me right now

Wordle answer for today, NYT Mini answers for the date, 7 Little Words daily, Contexto daily, Daily Themed Crossword daily, plus LinkedIn's puzzle suite (Zip, Tango, Queens, Pinpoint, Crossclimb). These pages are dated, time-stamped, and updated as new puzzles drop.

2. Help me figure it out myself

This is where the Wordle Solver, Jumble Solver, and the curated 5-letter word lists live. The site essentially functions as a structured dictionary slice, "five-letter words with OV in the middle starting with M" gets its own page, which is unusually useful for stubborn Wordle days.

3. Help me with this specific game

Roblox codes, Roblox Trello links, Fortnite cosmetics database, Robux to Dollars calculator, and full review articles for titles like Deadhaus Sonata, Directive 8020, SoulQuest, and Bus Bound. The site also runs its own original puzzle games — Concludle, Adoptle, Mislettered, and Word Frenzy — which I genuinely did not expect.

The Wordle Solver, Tested Across Two Weeks

The Wordle Solver is the tool most reviewers grade Try Hard Guides on, so I gave it the most attention. It's a rule-based filter, not an AI guesser. I enter the green letters in their correct positions, the yellow letters with the slots they don't belong in, and the grey letters I've eliminated. The tool cross-references that against its word database and returns a filtered list, prioritising words built from high-frequency letters (A, E, R, O, S, T).

What I liked

The interface is clean. Compared to other solver sites I tried side-by-side, this one isn't drowning in pop-ups or interstitials. Suggestions update instantly as I change inputs, which makes it easy to test a hypothesis ("what if the third letter is actually a vowel?") without reloading anything. After about a week of use, I noticed my unaided opening guesses had genuinely improved — I'd internalised which letters statistically clear the most ground.

Where it falls short

On three separate puzzles, the solver returned a word that the official NYT Wordle dictionary refused to accept. That's a problem if you're using a suggestion on guess six. The mobile layout is also noticeably tighter than the desktop version — input boxes feel cramped, and I mistapped letters more than I'd like. There's also a tendency to suggest semantically similar words in clusters, so when one strategy stalls, the alternatives the solver offers can feel like variations on the same theme rather than a fresh angle.

How I actually use it

Two or three manual guesses first, then the solver for the middle of the puzzle, never as the first thing I open. Treated that way it's a thinking partner. Treated as an autopilot it kills the game.

Crossword Answers Hub: Where the Site Quietly Dominates

If I had to pick the single feature that explains Try Hard Guides' search traffic, it's the crossword clue pages. The format is ruthlessly simple: the clue is the H1, the answer is right there above the fold, and there's a brief contextual note in case the clue is ambiguous. No 300-word preamble about the history of crosswords. No "before we reveal the answer, here's a fun fact." Just the answer.

Coverage includes the NYT Crossword (full puzzle), NYT Mini, NYT Midi, LA Times, Daily Themed, Daily Themed Mini, and the smaller weekday puzzles. Pages publish quickly after the puzzles go live, typically within an hour, and the older entries are archived rather than deleted, so backlogs are searchable.

The reason this matters: when I'm halfway through a Sunday NYT and stuck on one obscure 6-letter answer, I want the answer, not a content gateway. Try Hard Guides is one of the few sites that has internalised that.

Roblox Codes Library: The Real Traffic Engine

Wordle gets the press, but Roblox is where Try Hard Guides puts in real volume. Code pages exist for hundreds of titles, Blox Fruits, Blade Ball, Anime Champions Simulator, Anime Story 2, Hot's RNG, OG BLRR, Spin a Waifu, Project Mugetsu, and dozens more. Each page splits codes into Active and Expired sections, which is a small detail that makes a real difference when you're trying to grind freebies before a code window closes.

The codes themselves are sourced from developer Discords, social accounts, and live event drops. During my testing window, I redeemed codes from four different games and every active code worked. Two codes I tried from competing code sites had already rotated out, Try Hard Guides had them correctly flagged as expired.

Adjacent to the codes section: Roblox Free Items lists, Roblox Trello link aggregations (these are gold for understanding game mechanics), a Robux-to-Dollars calculator, and a Fortnite Skin Database that's separate but lives in the same Tools menu.

Game Reviews and Scoring: Yes, They're Real Reviews

This surprised me. I assumed Try Hard Guides was purely a utility site, but it runs a legitimate review section that's syndicated to both Metacritic and OpenCritic. OpenCritic shows 549 published reviews with an average score of 82, and the outlet recommends roughly 70% of the games it covers, a recommendation rate that lines up with most major review outlets.

Recent reviews I read through included OPUS: Prism Peak (90 — described as "an emotionally devastating, bittersweet work of art"), Gecko Gods (60 — flagged for repetitive puzzles), Lucky Tower Ultimate (90), and Shapez 2. The reviews are short by Eurogamer or RPS standards, but they're substantive, opinionated, and don't read as if a freelancer was paid by the word.

The site also covers a fair share of early-access and indie titles that bigger outlets ignore, which is where I think it adds the most value as a review destination.

Jumble Solver, Word Lists, and the Bonus Tools Nobody Talks About

Buried in the Tools dropdown are utilities I wouldn't have found if I hadn't been looking. The Jumble Solver takes scrambled letters and returns valid English words, handy for newspaper Jumbles, Boggle, and basically any scramble-based game. The Fortnite Skin DB is a searchable visual database of cosmetics, which I'd rate as genuinely better than most fan wikis I've used for that purpose.

Then there's the section I most enjoyed: Try Hard Guides' own original web games. Concludle is a deduction-style word game, Adoptle is a pet-guessing game, Mislettered is an anagram puzzle, and Word Frenzy is a faster-paced word challenge. None of them are going to replace Wordle in your morning routine, but they're free, they're not predatory, and they're a nice "I have ten minutes" option.

Navigation and Reading Experience

No registration, no email wall, no "subscribe to keep reading" interstitial. Search is at the top of every page and actually works. The mobile experience is the weak point, text gets dense, and the solver inputs feel cramped, but on desktop the site reads cleanly.

Ads exist, because the site is free and ad-funded (Shaun Savage has been open in public interviews about how Google Ad Exchange funded the site's growth in its first year). The ad density is moderate, not aggressive. I never had a video ad autoplay over an answer I was trying to read, which I unfortunately can't say about several competing sites.

Is Try Hard Guides Safe and Legit?

Yes, on both counts. The site doesn't require an account, doesn't push downloads, doesn't ask for permissions, and runs entirely as a browser-based reference. The Wordle Solver and Jumble Solver execute in the browser without sending puzzle inputs to any obvious tracking service. Codes are read-only — you redeem them inside Roblox itself, never on the Try Hard Guides domain.

For students and younger players, the site is friendlier than most gaming destinations because it's text-and-answer rather than chat-driven. There's no user-generated content layer beyond comments, which are moderated. I'd still recommend parental supervision for younger kids browsing the broader Roblox content (the games covered are rated independently and vary widely), but the Try Hard Guides site itself is low-risk.

My Rating Breakdown

After two weeks of daily use across the major sections, here's how I'd score Try Hard Guides on the criteria I actually care about. A genuinely useful answer-first reference, weakest where most sites are weakest (mobile UX), strongest where it counts (speed, accuracy, no friction).

Try Hard Guides vs the Alternatives

I tested the same Wordle puzzles and crossword clues against four other reference sites. Here's how the picture shakes out.

None of these are bad. WordTips in particular is excellent if all you care about is Wordle. But Try Hard Guides wins on breadth — it's the only one of the five that handles word puzzles, crosswords, Roblox codes, and original reviews under a single domain.

Pros, Cons, and Verdict

Pros

Answer-first page design with no filler intros. Crossword pages publish within an hour of puzzle release. Roblox code library is accurate and well-pruned of expired entries. Game reviews are syndicated to OpenCritic and Metacritic, with a credible 82-average score across 549 reviews. No login wall, no forced downloads, comments stay open, and the founder's track record (Pro Game Guides, Hearthstone Top Decks) gives the operation legitimacy.

Cons

The Wordle Solver occasionally suggests words the official NYT dictionary won't accept, which stings on guess six. Mobile UX is tighter than it should be, text density and cramped solver inputs are the main culprits. Edge-case suggestions from the solver can repeat patterns instead of pivoting. Ad density, while not aggressive, is present on most pages.

Verdict

Try Hard Guides earned its traffic the right way: by being faster, cleaner, and more accurate at a narrow set of jobs than the bigger sites it competes with. I'd recommend it for anyone who plays daily word puzzles, anyone in the Roblox ecosystem, and anyone who wants short-form game reviews from a team that updates within hours of release. If you want long-form games journalism or competitive-grade Wordle solvers, look elsewhere. For everything in between, this is the one I'd bookmark.