Letter Scramble

Letter Scramble is played on the blackboard behind a café counter. Seven wooden tiles bounce onto an oak ledge in a jumble, and the clock starts at two minutes. Type or tap to lift tiles up into the word you are building, send it with Enter, and if it is a word it goes up on the board in chalk with a little ding of the counter bell. Words are filed by length as you find them — threes down the left, the long ones on the right — so you can see at a glance where the gaps are. A three-letter word is worth a hundred points and a six is worth a thousand, which means the longer you can hold out for, the better the round goes.

Every rack is built from a real seven-letter word, so there is always one word in there that uses all seven tiles. Finding it is worth fifteen hundred points and fifteen hundred again as a bonus, and the whole board lights up for it. Getting there is the fun of the thing: shuffle the tiles when your eyes stop seeing anything, say the letters out loud, look for the -ING and the -ER and the S that makes a plural. It is the kind of brain workout that fits in the gap between two coffees.

There are three ways to play. Daily Seven deals one rack a day, the same seven letters for everybody on the date, and finishes with a quiet result card showing what you found and what you missed — no sharing, no leaderboard, just the board and you. Endless keeps the clock running across rack after rack: long words buy you seconds, the seven-letter word buys you thirty and a fresh set of tiles, and your best run is kept as a high score in your browser. Relaxed takes the clock away entirely, so you can sit with a rack for as long as you like. The word list — seven and a half thousand everyday words — is built into the game, so nothing is fetched and nothing is stored anywhere but on your own machine.