Jumble Crossword (Chicago Tribune)

Jumble is the newspaper word scramble created in 1954 and now produced by David L. Hoyt and Jeff Knurek for Tribune Content Agency. The Jumble Crossword is its crossword spin-off, syndicated daily, and the Chicago Tribune's Fun & Games site carries it under the name Jumble Crossword Daily. The game page says Hoyt meshes interesting facts, wordplay and creative visual tricks into each puzzle.

The puzzle runs six days a week, Monday to Saturday, and the game keeps a calendar of past puzzles to go back to. The grid is small. Every answer comes with two kinds of help: an ordinary clue and the answer's letters, scrambled. You can unscramble the letters, solve from the clue, or use the crossing words, and most players mix all three. The same daily puzzle is carried by other outlets that license it, such as CNN's games page.

The game plays in the browser on the Tribune's games portal, free with ads and without an account; the portal shows banner and billboard ad slots around the game frame. The same site also hosts the classic daily Jumble and the larger Sunday Jumble.

It is gentler than a standard crossword because the scrambled letters nearly always give the answer away, so it makes a good first puzzle of the day or a crossword for younger solvers.