Jumble Jet

What is Jumble Jet?

Jumble Jet is an unscramble words game. You get a word with its letters mixed up, and you put them back in order. Every word you solve boosts the jet along its route. There are 40 flights, starting with Lisbon to Madrid and ending in Toronto, with stops in places like Reykjavik, Cairo, Kathmandu, Tokyo, Honolulu and Buenos Aires.

Your fuel gauge is your clock. Solve all the words on a flight before the tank runs dry and you land, collect the city's passport stamp and earn up to 3 stars.

Jumble Jet is free and runs in the browser on phone, tablet or computer. No download. Your stars, stamps, miles and hints are saved on your device.

How to play

1. The scrambled letters sit in a rack under your boarding pass.
2. Tap letters in order to drop them into the empty slots. Tap a placed letter to send it back.
3. When every slot is full, the word is checked automatically.
4. Right, and the tiles fly off to the jet. Wrong, and they shake and drop back into the rack so you can try again.

Any real word that uses all the letters counts. If you spell a different anagram from the one we picked, you get the points and a little note that your word works too.

The fuel only burns while you're working on a word. It doesn't tick during the short check and celebration in between, and pausing stops it completely.

Controls on phone and computer

On a phone or tablet, tap tiles. The Shuffle, Hint and Skip buttons sit along the bottom. On a computer you can play the whole game from the keyboard.

Flights, fuel and stars

Word length grows as you cross the map, and the longer flights get one extra word.

Each flight's fuel is set by its words: for every word you get 3 seconds per letter plus 6. So the first flight gives you 90 seconds for five 4 letter words, and the last gives you 180 seconds for six 8 letter words.

The Flights board shows every route, your stars on each, and which ones are still locked.

Scoring

• 10 points per letter for every word you solve.
• Quick bonus: another 5 per letter if you solve it in under 1.6 seconds per letter, without a hint. That's under 8 seconds for a 5 letter word.
• Streak multiplier: each word in a row adds 0.25 to your multiplier, up to x3 on a streak of 9.
• Hints halve the points for that word.

Hints, shuffles and skips

A hint puts the next correct letter into its slot and locks it there in gold. If you had wrong letters after it, they go back to the rack. You start with 3 and earn a new one each time you solve 4 words in a row without a hint, up to 9.

Shuffle mixes the letters still in the rack. It's free, so lean on it.

Skip gives up on a word and shows you the answer. On a flight it costs 10 seconds of fuel and swaps in a new word of the same length. In Long Haul it costs 8 seconds. Either way it ends your streak.

Daily Flight and Long Haul

Daily Flight

The same 8 words for everyone each day, two each of 4, 5, 6 and 7 letters, with 150 seconds of fuel for the lot. A skipped word is gone for the day. Land with fuel to spare and every leftover second is worth 3 bonus points. Your share card shows a rocket for quick solves, a check for normal ones, a bulb for hinted ones and a cloud for misses.

Long Haul

Endless flying. You take off with 45 seconds in a 60 second tank, and every word you solve tops it up by 2 seconds per letter plus 5. The catch is that fuel burns a little faster with every word, so the pressure keeps building. You fly over a new city every 4 words, and the words grow from 4 letters up to 8. Your best score goes on the Long Haul leaderboard when you're signed in.

Miles, paint jobs and passport stamps

Every solved word earns 20 miles per letter, in every mode. Miles unlock paint jobs in the Hangar:

The Passport collects a stamp for each of the 40 cities you land in on a flight.

Tips for unscrambling words

• Hunt for endings. Look for ING, ED, ER, LY, EST and TION in the pile. Park those letters in the last slots and the rest gets much smaller.
• Then look for beginnings. RE, UN, PRE, DIS and common pairs like TH, SH, CH, ST and BR usually start words.
• Place the vowels. Most English words alternate consonants and vowels in some way. If you have two vowels, try them in the second and fourth spots first.
• Shuffle on purpose. We scramble words so they don't spell another word and so most letters move from their real spot. A shuffle or two shakes your eyes loose from the starting jumble.
• Don't skip on a flight unless you have to. Ten seconds is a lot of fuel early on. A hint is usually the cheaper rescue, and you earn them back with 4 clean solves.
• Chase the streak in Long Haul. At x3, a 6 letter quick solve is worth 270 points. Quick, steady solves beat slow perfect ones.

Questions