Scrimp

Scrimp is a free daily word puzzle. You get four or more clues and a row of empty tiles that is deliberately too short to spell all the answers out. The clues are not the hard part. They are plain, and most solvers have the words inside a minute. The puzzle is where the words go. The answers have to be packed into one another, sharing letters at their seams, and exactly one arrangement fits at that length. CHAIR, HAIRY, AIRY and RYE. Seventeen letters into seven tiles: C H A I R Y E. Every other daily word game treats a word as something to find. Wordle hides one. Connections and Strands ask you to sort or trace. Spelling Bee and Letter Boxed hand you letters and ask you to build. None of them asks you to take words you already have and pack them into each other. Every puzzle is verified exhaustively before it ships: all arrangements are enumerated, and it is published only if exactly one works at that length and no shorter row is possible. The clues are original, written for this game. Puzzles run Monday to Sunday on a difficulty ramp, 400 points Monday rising to 1,000 Sunday. Points accumulate into twelve ranks borrowed from the letterpress trade, from Printer's Devil to Printer Laureate. Free. No account, no email, no app, nothing to buy. It runs in any browser, can be added to a home screen and played offline, and every puzzle ever published stays open and still pays in full.