Arkadium Daily Crossword

Arkadium is a web games company that also runs the games pages of many newspapers, and its Daily Crossword is one of the plainest crosswords it offers: a standard American grid with straightforward, mostly definition-style clues, new each day. The puzzles are numbered and credited to Boatload Puzzles in the game.

When the game opens you see a calendar of the month, with your points for the month and how many puzzles you have solved. Today's date has a PLAY button and a daily bonus of 50 points; earlier days are kept too, though the calendar asks you to register a free Arkadium account before it opens them. The grid and the clue list sit side by side, a timer runs at the top, and the Check, Reveal and Print buttons work on a letter, a word or the whole puzzle.

The crossword is free in the browser with banner ads around the game, which Arkadium's paid Plus membership removes, and a leaderboard shows how others did. It suits solvers who want a daily grid without a newspaper subscription and without cryptic wordplay, and it sits alongside Arkadium's smaller mini crossword and its themed crosswords from Stan Newman, Sheffer and Penny Dell.