Jumble Crossword (CNN)

Jumble Crossword crosses two newspaper staples: the Jumble word scramble and the crossword. It is supplied by Tribune Content Agency, the syndicate behind Jumble, and CNN has carried it on its free games page since June 2024, next to its Daily Crossword, Sudoku and the 5 Things news quiz.

Each day's grid is small, and every answer comes with two kinds of help: an ordinary clue and the answer's own letters, jumbled. So you can solve each word as an anagram, from its definition, or from the letters already crossing it. When the grid is full, some squares are circled, and their letters spell a bonus word once you rearrange them.

The player has the usual crossword tools: you can reveal or validate a square, a word or the whole puzzle, turn on a setting that checks each letter as you type it, and run a timer. A calendar opens the earlier puzzles of the month, Monday to Saturday (Sundays are greyed out), and you can reset the current day to try it again from scratch.

It is free with ads and needs no account. It is gentler than a standard crossword, because the scrambled letters almost always give the answer away, which makes it a good first daily puzzle or a warm-up before a harder grid.