Last updated on November 28th, 2025 at 11:42 am
Typeshift – Entertainment Game Review
Typeshift is a Entertainment/Puzzle/Word game from STFJ LLC, first launched in 18th March 2017.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 491+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Typeshift Stand Out
From the creator of SpellTower, comes a new and completely original word game!
Anagrams meets Word Search, with a sprinkle of Crosswords.
Typeshift is the modern anagram puzzle; re-imagined from the ground up, combining wordplay, modern game design, and a mobile-first approach.
In most anagram games, you search for new combinations within a single word, but in Typeshift, you search within three to five words stacked & scrambled up together.
Shift columns of letters up and down as you try to spell words in the center row. Play continues until you have used all letters in a puzzle at least once.
Special Clue Puzzles combine Crosswords with Anagrams as you match clever clues provided by Typeshift's various puzzle authors.
- Daily Word Game Play with Global Leaderboards –
Typeshift features a free daily challenge with global leaderboards. The easiest challenge for the week appears on Monday, and progressively more challenging puzzles build throughout the week.
Compare your fastest Typeshift daily solving times with players around the globe!
——WHAT CRITICS ARE SAYING
"Addictive and edifying, like popping a special kind of bubble wrap that expands your vocabulary.”
- The Verge
"Typeshift is a unmissable entry to the [word] genre." Gold Award.
- Pocket Gamer
"Typeshift is f*cking awesome"
- Giant Bombcast
"The Word Puzzle Game You've Been Waiting For"
- Waypoint
"Well worth your time"
- Sixcolors
——WHATS IN THE “BOX”?
Typeshift comes with over a hundred free puzzles, with more coming soon, plus new free daily puzzles every day.
Additional puzzle packs may be purchased in-app.
Purchasing any puzzle pack removes ads, and unlocks themes & detailed statistics.
——A WORD FROM THE DEVELOPER
Typeshift continues my quest to re-imagine classic newspaper games in the digital era.
Where SpellTower tackled word search and Really Bad Chess handled chess puzzles, Typeshift re-examines Anagrams and Crosswords.
Typeshift has been a joy to develop, and I hope you have as much fun playing it as I had making it.
As always, thanks so much for your support!
-zach
This Entertainment game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Typeshift is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 16th October 2021
Recent improvements include:
puzzle updates
Download & Availability
Typeshift is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
This game is great. We really love beginning our day with the daily puzzle and stretching our thinking muscles before we head to work. We even convinced our mother to download the app on her Android where we would compete for best time on the daily puzzle. However, a recent update has put an end to our sparing because the daily puzzles are now different between the devices. Why? We are still tackling the daily puzzles, but we're not as challenged to do our best with the loss of our rival. Would love it if they were the same again.
We really enjoy this game, Ive purchased several packs. We like the variety in difficulty and puzzle length.
The only thing is we have a permanent notification that a new game is ready, even after Ive completed the game for the day.
We love word games. This is a very good one and can be surprisingly challenging at times. The only thing that keeps us from giving five stars is that it counts the days in a row that you complete a game but it is completely infuriating that there is no way to go back and complete a game that you missed, so you re-set all the way back to zero. Completely. Infuriating.
This is a very fun and addictive game – our favorites are the clue puzzles (wish there were more), and we are playing through them for we think the third time. Our main complaint is that the UI could be much better. The "buttons" the bottom of the screen are very hard to use in"Gesture based" iPhones without a home button and voice control is not a viable alternative as voice control is not compatible with this app. Unfortunately, this also means that the last clue can be difficult to select in puzzles with many clues.
We were not able to advance beyond the second round without Id eroding prots as a word. Once the round was complete the game linked prots to a nonexistent Merriam Webster page, as the word does not exists. Fundamental error in game design.
We start our brain with TypeShift first thing in the morning. Then its on to the coffee! Challenging and fun! Id recommend buying at least one game pack so that you can keep your stats.
Brilliant! This game is simple but challenging. But most of all its ELEGANT. There are lots of word unscrambling or jumble puzzles that are very good but this is head and shoulders above the rest. From its concept through to its presentation this game is thoughtful, creative, beautiful and a joy to play. Even the tumbling way that the letters are manipulated draws you into the play. If we could we would give it ten stars. The only hitch is that if you miss the free daily puzzle theres no going back to past games.
We love this game, especially the Clue puzzles. But we havent seen a new one on over a year? Whats up.
Especially the section with clues. Our only real complaint is that they recognize proper nouns/gerunds.
We have loved playing this game for several years now. Its part of our morning routine. Today, however, we were shocked to find that the first word in todays daily puzzle (Sunday, Oct. 4, 2020) that we could solve was the offense term darkies, one used to refer to people of color, especially Black persons. Please be more careful to not use offensive terms in your puzzles. This one instance wontt make us stop playing at this point we just wanted to point it out. Thank you.
The developer definitely was a bit greedy. The game is set up as a way to get the player to buy IAP to unlock more levels as more than 95% of the game is locked behind Payable level packs it would have been so much better for this game to cost, lets say, $4 with more levels unlocked to the player. It seems like a cash grab and is kinda sad because this developer could come to mind as a quality developer if they werent so obviously trying to get the player to buy into the game once its installed and not before.
We use this app on a daily basis. We think the puzzles are fun. We didnt like the ads so we upgraded or purchased a pack. We have noticed the general stats have stopped updating – we guess at the 218th puzzle as we have played more than 500 days – something is amiss. The daily puzzle stats seem to be correct ( on the top half of the stats page).
Every ad for Apple Arcade goes to the App Store without being touched. Only had an option to go back to Safari, and then have to close out and reopen game tab. Pretty tedious; only complaint though.
Yall need to fix your backend database. More than once the app has failed to recognize trinity as a word.
We love this game. It can be very challenging and we appreciate that in a word game. This game has ads AND iaps. If you bought all of the packs, youd be forking over $20. Seems steep to us.
We had to wipe our phone and now we cannot restore our purchases to remove ads. Contacted support via email but got no answer.
Love this game! So unique and fun. Two things – can you please offer more clue packs and bundles for them? We cant justify $1.99 for 20 puzzles Ill solve within a day. Also why cant we use hints ok clue puzzles? That would be helpful.
Gameplay is pretty fun but Im not gonna drop multiple dollars on it.
Fun game but why is it reading info from our clipboard.
The mechanics are a lot of fun, but the puzzles have answers that arent words. Botes, Morae, Dorab? No. The game is linked to Merriam Webster; youd think they have some kind of screening mechanism.
Love this game. Need more puzzle packs, please. Thank you.
We really enjoy this game. So much that we were irritated by ads between so invested $4 and now more clue packs and no ads. As for the gameplay, it is fun, challenging and easy to get lost in. Going to find more from this developer but if you have it, play it, enjoy it, buy a pack and support the studio.
It amazes us to see how many new words have be added to the dictionary, excited on whats to come.
Occult scoring/rating process, but really entertaining word puzzles. Fun, challenging, frustrating. Pleasure has not worn off over time; in fact without strict rationing theyd all have been used up weeks ago. Wish there were more.
Oh wow. We tried playing this game but there were so many ads and we couldnt find a way to pay to remove them. Today the game was in an App Store story about indiegames and we decided to read the whole developer notes, to see if things had changed. To mu surprise, we realized any 99c purchase would have removed the ads. Happy to pay for this game, and get some bonus puzzles, too.
What we wish theyd change is their notification system: we get notification badges even when we solved the Daily Game. As a person who runs Inbox Zero, we find this highly annoying.
This app gave us the idea to fill our moat with bears. Thanks for that! Plus, when we finish putting the bears in the moat, we can sit back and have fun playing this game. 10/10 more clue puzzles pls.
Every time we get the ad for World War Rising we cant get back to the game. We cant think of any other way to send this message to whoever bundles the ads than a review. Please fix the glitch, Professors.
However, would love to see core words in the daily puzzles. We solve them, but quite often with different words and it would be really interesting to see the words Ive missed.
Needs on-screen word definitions. There's plenty of room on the screen for that, and we hate switching over to Safari to do a Google search every time we build a weird word we've never heard before. EDIT: Turns out you can get definitions after the fact on the winning screen. Better than Googling, but still slightly clunky.
We don't understand the scoring at all, but we enjoy the daily challenge puzzle. Fun workout for a word puzzle fan.
We love this game and am hooked. We have already played all the packs and wondered when new ones might be available. We keep playing the daily off the app, but when we tried to access the game through the Miriam Webster site we got the spammy/buggy ad thing that kept popping up. A warning would be nice. Anyway, get more packs for the app, please.
What is so irritating is paying big bucks for 20 puzzles and then one of those puzzles is a lazy, sloppy, ill-conceived, MISSPELLED versions of words. What malpractice for a dictionary company to promote poor spelling. AND we HAVE TO PAY FOR IT. And here is the good news, when the words are spelled correctly, this game is the most fun in the world. But for the packs full of misspellings, this would be our favorite game. (And you should warn us when were paying for a misspelled word.).
Do you enjoy having your ipad suddenly blare ads? No, neither do we. Enjoyed the games for several days. Then we realized a few things: we could resolve puzzles by finding words that werent the core words, some words that earned credit werent words, not even the in-app dictionary, and some words which we unscrambled did not earn credit, despite being actual correctly spelled words. The app does count words that have been archaic since the 12 century (doubtful most of us or the app developers know those words), spellings and words that are rare, lesser known variants of words, technical words, and words specific to certain specialized disciplines and knowledge areas. We just got bored and would simply roll around the letters until the game declared Id made a word. Basically, this game is just lazy. We dont understand how apps get the app store spotlight and meet the developers. Do tell, Apple. Do developers get to pay for that placement.
Any idea when new puzzles will be released? Or is it one of those fun game apps that eventually stops putting out updates or new content and gets deleted from our phone. We dont want to do that because we love this game! Come back.
We were enjoying this game for a few weeks until the puzzles starting blasting out past the sides of our screen, rendering them useless. There was an update today saying it was adding support for XS Max, which it had been working fine on until a few days ago, but puzzles still are off the screen. If things go back to normal we may adjust this review, but for now it gets an "it was great, until".
Newest update has caused our letters to be stretched off screen on our iPhone xs max.
A word puzzle game should NEVER rely on a player finding archaic words that are no longer used. The second time this happened to us we deleted the app (we challenge you to find a published use of the word likest in the last century). There are too many other good word puzzlers to forgive that.
Ive been playing this since it came out. Ive bought all the word packs. Challenging. One of the few games that keeps us playing well after we intended to stop. But, the full page, timed ads for gambling cross a line. Im not playing for free. We deserve an ad-free game experience. The gambling ads are deceptive and designed to draw people in to gambling. The odds have got to be terrible but stock photo people winning $2,000 to $52,000 are lies. How much money will you lose? We object to the ads when we pay for typeshift puzzles. We object to the slimy gambling ads. Cant give this a higher rating than 2.
Really?? Im just playing a game!! Stop political ads.
We purchased several packs when first starting this game. They do not show up on the packs list now. Email to the support hasnt answered our concerns. We enjoy the daily puzzles and the free packs; would give it a higher rating if it worked and we could receive our purchases. Its been a couple weeks since we first wrote for support. We have not received any communication from Typeshift. Dont buy any packs or expect any help from the support team. Still have not received any support or info on our purchases. Dont buy any of the packs.
How do we get the new games packs we paid for. Not happy.
Twice it froze our phone completely. We really enjoyed it until then. At first we could not even restart it.
The pack they give you for free, to try and entice you to pay for other packs, is not all the fun. We get the hints are supposed to not just give it away but it should be better tailored to the word than they are. Fun concept though. Ill just stick to the daily challenges.
Another great game by the one and only Zack Gage. We have others of his and each is a unique and challenging puzzle/game. Im glad there are variations and having levels done by players is a nice addition too. Highly recommended for young and old. Flawless mechanics, as always. Our cat loves to watch us at play.
One of our faves. Although, wish there where more clue puzzles. We have multiple games from this developer. Generally speaking about the developers they are the ONLY developers that are fair about Ads and wont inundate you like sooo many other games out there. Why we always go back to playing their games while others are nearly instantly deleted off our phone.
we wish they would offer more puzzles! Ive purchased all the Standard Packs.
We love this game and play the daily puzzle as part of our morning routine. But, we miss being able to look up the meaning of words. Pleas add a dictionary in. Also, the ads at the end of the game are getting annoying. Often we cant cry rid of them except by shutting down our phone which is a major impediment to enjoying the game.
We love this game and play it regularly, but we have a few minor complaints. First, Id like more clue puzzles. Ive played through all the available ones multiple times. Second, it would be nice if you could reset puzzle packs once youve completed them so you can track where you are to replay. Last, the in-app dictionary has stopped working. Id be happy if there were an update to fix it.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.2.10
- Size: 70.38 MB
- iOS: 14.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: STFJ LLC
Last updated: 16th October 2021 | Genre: Entertainment, Puzzle | Developer: STFJ LLC