Pair Down

Pair Down comes from Jeff Chen, a prolific New York Times crossword constructor, and Jim Horne, who for years ran the XWord Info crossword site. It is free to play with no account, with a new numbered puzzle each day since October 2025, and its archive page now carries the mark of Hey, Good Game, the small studio behind Squeezy and Wordplete.

The idea is subtraction. Each row is a word, such as GYRATE, with a letter tucked inside it that does not belong; take that letter out and another word is left, GRATE. In Level One you remove one letter per row, and the letters you removed, read from top to bottom, spell a secret word (in the game's example, YES). That word is the hint for Level Two.

Level Two removes two letters in a row from each word: SPYWARE becomes SPARE once YW comes out. Now the first removed letters spell one word and the second letters another, together making the day's secret phrase, such as YOU WIN.

Every day there is an Easy and a Hard game. In Hard, some letters are fuzzed out and only come into focus when you click them, and using fewer clicks earns more stars. It suits crossword solvers and anyone who likes a puzzle with a reveal at the end.

The board is a short stack of letter bubbles. Click a letter and it turns blue; when every row has one, Submit checks your work. Reveal One shows a letter for you, and each Reveal or Check costs one of five stars, with a sixth star for a clean solve. The last week of puzzles is open to everyone in the archive, and a free account opens the full archive, streaks across devices and a leaderboard.