Hidden Joey

Hidden Joey is built on kangaroo words: words that carry a smaller synonym of themselves, spelled in order, inside their own letters. The panel's example is BLOSSOM, which hides BLOOM. A word is laid out in tiles with a short clue above it, and you catch the joey by tapping its letters left to right and leaving the rest behind. The day is numbered and comes in three short rounds, the first of them labelled The Warm-up, and the game is Australian to its bones, right down to a note in the help panel about where the word kangaroo comes from.

1. Read the word in the tiles and the clue printed above it.
2. Tap the letters of the hidden word left to right. Two or more selected letters make a guess, and the ones you pick light up as you go.
3. Hit Catch to submit, or clear and start the selection again.
4. Take a hint if you need one, then move through the day's three rounds.

Kangaroo words are one of those pieces of language trivia that sound like a novelty until somebody builds a proper game on them, and this is a proper game: three rounds, a visible try counter, hints that cost nothing but arrive in an order that keeps the good one until last. The mechanic rewards a specific kind of looking, sliding through a word for a synonym while ignoring the letters in between, and it stays satisfying because the answer has to work twice, by spelling and by meaning. It is made independently in Australia, has a Reddit community printed in its own help panel, and finds room in there for a note on the Guugu Yimithirr origin of the word kangaroo.

Your tries are drawn as a row of kangaroo tracks beside the word TRIES, and a miss fades one of them, which makes the cost of a wild tap visible before you take it. Selected letters turn gold in place and gather into a tray under the word, so a partial guess is legible without submitting it. Two misses on the same word rule that word out entirely, and the hint ladder is free but ordered: the joey's length first, then one word ruled out, then a clue to its meaning.

The daily, in three rounds

One numbered puzzle a day, described on the front screen as three short rounds, opening with The Warm-up.

• The joey keeps its letters in order and cannot be reshuffled, so read the word from left to right and ask what you can afford to skip, never what you can rearrange.
• It also has to mean roughly what the host word means. A shorter word hiding inside the letters is not the answer unless it is a synonym, which is what rules out most of the fragments you will spot first.
• Two misses kill a word, so spend the free length hint before your second guess rather than after it.