Word Scramble

Word scramble, or anagrams if you prefer the older name for it. You get the jumbled letters, a clue pointing at what they spell, and a row of tiles to tap into place. Tapping a filled slot sends that letter back to the row, so there is no cost to trying something and being wrong.

Six themes, eleven sets. Animals and Food are the gentlest of them. Movies runs from a four-letter shark thriller up to two twelve-letter titles. Sports covers four-letter classics through to ten-letter Olympic disciplines, Countries spans four continents, and Word Scramble for Kids caps everything at nine letters with clues written to be read out loud.

Difficulty here is set by word length rather than obscurity — four to six letters is easy, seven to nine is medium, ten and above is hard — which means a word everybody knows can still land in the hard tier purely for being long.