Jumble

This Jumble is not an anagram to be unwound word by word but a five-by-five square hollowed out in four places, twenty-one tiles, six intersecting words, and an exchange budget shown in large type beneath the board. You don't type anything: you click one tile, then another, and the two swap, the counter losing one unit. The colors do the rest: green for a letter in its place, amber for a letter that belongs to the word crossing the square but is in the wrong spot, cream for everything else. The right column unfolds How to play, Scoring, FAQ and About Jumble; the header shows the day's date with a chevron, a leaderboard, a pause button and a night-mode button. The site publishes its own notes below the game, which recall where the format comes from and how to progress.

1. Read the entire board before touching anything: some of the letters are already in place from the start.
2. Click a first tile, it is outlined in red, then a second: the two swap places and the exchange counter goes down.
3. Re-read the colors after each swap, keeping in mind that intersection squares serve a horizontal word and a vertical word at the same time.
4. Close all six words before you exhaust the budget shown under the grid.

The pleasure is not in finding the words, it is in finding the order. On this board all the letters are present from the start and the solution is theoretically readable at a glance: what costs is the sequence, because a swap moves two things at once and a well-placed tile can be sent away again if you use it as the currency of exchange. The format therefore forces you to play two or three moves ahead, like on a sliding puzzle, with words layered on top. The fact that six words intersect, and that nine tiles serve two words at once, turns every decision into a small problem with a double constraint, and that's what distinguishes this version from the newspaper anagram whose name it borrows.

Everything is conveyed through three colors, updated after each swap: green when the tile is in its place, amber when the letter belongs to the word that passes through the square but not to that particular square, cream for everything else. There is no message, no validation request, no submit button. The only other feedback is the counter under the grid, which drops from 15 to 14 after the first swap, and which is in fact the real penalty of the game: a failed swap does not count as an error, it costs a resource.

Daily game

A daily grid, dated in the header, with leaderboards and a free account offered alongside.

• First look for mutual swaps. Those where two tiles do each other a favour: a single move places two letters, the best return on the board.
• When no mutual swap exists, map out the loop before clicking. A chain of three tiles can be resolved in two swaps if you break it in the right order, three otherwise.
• Treat intersections as a priority: a crossing tile constrains two words at once, so amber is ambiguous there; it means the letter serves the horizontal word or the vertical word, not necessarily both.
• The displayed budget is larger than necessary; the site's notes say ten swaps are sufficient for fifteen available: the margin exists to be wrong once or twice, not to improvise from the first click.