Jumble

15swaps remaining

How to play

Rearrange the scrambled letters into six words — three across and three down — in fifteen swaps.

Rearrange the scrambled letters into six valid words — three across and three down — in fifteen swaps or fewer.
Tap a tile, then tap another to swap them. Tap a tile twice to deselect.
P
Green — this letter is already in the right place.
N
Yellow — this letter belongs in the word, but somewhere else.
M
White — this letter isn’t needed in that word.
A
P
T
C
E
A yellow corner tile indicates that either the across or the down word uses that letter.

Scoring

Every solve starts at 100 points; bonuses stack on top. Your leaderboard total is the sum of your points across every daily game you play.

Earn points

Solve+100Complete the puzzle.
Streak+1 / day+1 point for each day of your current Jumble streak.

Speed bonus (best one applies)

Lightning+25Finish in 1:00 or less.
Fast+15Finish in 2:30 or less.
Quick+8Finish in 5:00 or less.

Beat par (best one applies)

Eagle+80Solve in the optimal number of moves.
Birdie+55A move or two over optimal.
Par+30A few over optimal.
Bogey+10Just above that.

FAQ

What counts as solved?

All six words — three across and three down — reading correctly at once.

How do I swap tiles?

Tap one tile, then tap another to swap them. Tap a selected tile again to deselect it.

What happens when I run out of swaps?

You get fifteen swaps; whatever you don't use shows as your swaps remaining. Solve it in as few as you can.

What do the tile colors mean?

Green means the letter is in its correct spot, yellow means it belongs in that word but a different spot, and grey means it isn't needed there. Tiles recolor after every swap.

Why is a corner tile yellow?

Corners sit in both a row and a column — yellow means the across or the down word wants that letter.

About Jumble

Jumble is a free daily word game from Greatest Games. Rearrange the tiles until all six words read right, in as few swaps as you can. A new puzzle is published every day at midnight US Eastern, and it plays in your browser with no account and nothing to download.

Read the full note →

From the desk

Notes on Jumble

Where Jumble comes from

The name honors newsprint royalty. The syndicated Jumble — scrambled words waiting to be unscrambled over morning coffee — was created by Martin Naydel in 1954 and became one of the most widely printed puzzles in the American paper. For seventy years the pleasure has been the same: the letters are all there; only the order is wrong.

Our Jumble crosses that anagram tradition with a newer idea, the swap grid — a format popularized by Waffle, one of the daily games that arrived in Wordle's wake in 2022. Instead of unscrambling words one at a time, you untangle six interlocking words at once on a 5×5 board with four gaps, trading tiles in pairs while Wordle-style colors report on every move. The interlock is what elevates it: nine of the twenty-one tiles sit at intersections, serving an across word and a down word simultaneously, so every trade you consider has to answer to two masters. It is an anagram with the structural discipline of a crossword.

How to get better at Jumble

Read the whole board before your first swap. The scramble always opens with some letters already home, and every daily board can be untangled in exactly ten swaps against your budget of fifteen. Ten swaps for a boardful of strays means most trades must do double duty — each swap should land at least one letter, and the good ones land two.

Hunt mutual swaps first. If a tile's letter belongs where another tile sits, and that tile's letter belongs right back where the first one came from, one trade scores two greens. These pairs are the cheapest moves on the board; spend your early swaps finding them rather than improvising.

When no mutual swap exists, think in cycles: this A belongs where that R sits, the R belongs where the E sits, the E belongs back at the A. A three-tile cycle costs two swaps no matter how you break it — but breaking it wrong costs three. Trace the loop before you touch it.

Give the corners priority. An intersection tile constrains two words, so a yellow there is ambiguous — it means the across word or the down word wants that letter, not necessarily both. Resolving a corner often cracks two words at once; guessing at one blindly can poison both readings.

Mind duplicates. A letter greyed out in one word may still be needed elsewhere on the board, and two identical letters can trade places for nothing. Before you move a grey tile, check whether its letter appears in any unsolved word.

Late in the solve, stop experimenting. With four or five tiles left, the words are nearly legible — say the fragments aloud, settle the remaining cycle in your head, and place the last letters like type in a stick, deliberately.

A round in the life

The middle row reads N-I-N-O-O — nearly a word, not quite. You spot the O and N that need to trade and swap them: ONION locks in green. That trade also greens a corner, and the top row now shows a yellow S in the first square with an S-shaped hole down the first column. You trace the cycle — the H sitting mid-column belongs up top, the S up top belongs mid-column — and one mutual swap finishes both jobs. Two more trades settle the last across word, and the board goes green with five swaps still in the bank.