the wordle genre is kind of super cool by the way. the sociality and routine and the potential for teaching and learning, as well as the space for good old abstract games, is really nice. practice modes are wonderful things. the little dynamic of "give you a little more info every time" is satisfying. for some games, researching is an ordeal unto itself and maybe even outright necessary. for others it's discouraged (I assume).
I've been playing metazooa and metaflora. They're good fits for me as someone who browsed taxonomy Wikipedia when I was younger and who's always looking for opportunities to learn more about animals and plants and how they're related to each other.
Some of my friends choose their technically suboptimal favorite animals first, and others of us theorycraft our opening theory like chess players. (I assume the wordle opening theory on the second step is much more complex; in wordle, you get six values with 3 possibilities each, and in this game you get one value, though there are many possibilities for what it could be.) Hints are usually useful when something has a lot of possible immediate subclades.
There's also the game of deciding what external tools to use, if any. Wikipedia has cladograms on some but not all pages. Wikipedia lists of species and genera and families often give no clear indication of which will yield the most culturally salient creatures. Sometimes it doesn't list the exact same clades as the game because of messy, inconsistent plant systemics. You can use a tree of life browser, but it won't usually have common names anywhere, and common names are important for quickly pinpointing what's culturally salient. using worldwide iNaturalist searches and sorting by species can often yield results, but it takes patience. It's complex to navigate, difficult, time consuming, and wonderful.
My only complaint is that they're made by a company that engages in practices like lots of ads (but only one at a time), and a lot of the animals the most enthusiastic players (zoologists and botanists) love most aren't in the game. Generally, only highly culturally-salient creatures to English speaking countries are included (and as a result, in our mycophobic culture, I'm not sure I expect to ever see a fungus one). Even so I get to either feel amazing or hone my research skills and get a huge headache. And hopefully in the end, I'll realize some of my blind spots and learn some new things. And to be inspired to put these more abstract data structures into the context of my wider ecology.