Daily Game Recommendation: Align

I recently recommended a daily online game called Raddle. Now I have another one that's pretty fun. It's from the Boston Globe, and it's called Align.

Envision a five-by-five square of letters. Each "line" of that square reading across or down forms a word (so there are 10 words total). Now you know how an answer to an Align puzzle looks. Mix up most of the letters but leave enough "in place" to form the clues, and that's how the beginning of the puzzle might look.

The trick is to look at the letters that are locked in place and try to figure out if the letters you can swap around will be useful: "Hmm . . . I see C _ R _ L. That could be CORAL or CAROL. Is there an A and an O kicking around?"

Sometimes the puzzles mix things up by having the swappable letter actually be two letters.

I like it because, unlike a lot of daily games, there isn't a way to "lose" per se; it's like a crossword puzzle or a word search, where the idea is to just solve the puzzle. You can try to challenge yourself to do it as quickly as possible or in as few a swaps as you can, but I prefer a more leisurely approach.

-- Steven Marsh