Up & Down Words

Up & Down Words comes from David L. Hoyt, the puzzle maker behind Jumble's daily word games and many other syndicated puzzles, and is distributed by Andrews McMeel Universal in print and on the web; its syndication page also lists it as a USA Today puzzle. On GoComics it is one of the Puzzle Society games, and some newspapers carry it on their own puzzle pages.

The puzzle is a column of numbered bars, each holding a two-word phrase or compound word. The twist, in its publisher's words, is that the second word of each phrase is the first word of the phrase that follows. In the game's art the chain starts with GOOD DAY, so the next phrase begins with DAY, and it ends six steps later at BLANKET. Each step has its own crossword-style clue.

Solving one phrase hands you half of the next, and the fixed word at the far end lets you work up from the bottom too, so a stuck chain can be attacked from both directions.

Up & Down Words came to GoComics when the Puzzle Society closed and moved its 34 games there, each with a new level every day and its full archive. It is included with a GoComics Premium subscription, which is ad-free. It suits players of compound-word chain games and of crossword clues.