Last updated on February 8th, 2026 at 10:40 am
Crossly – Word Game Review
Crossly is a Word/Puzzle game from Mercury Intermedia, Inc., first launched in 24th July 2014.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 1+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Crossly Stand Out
Challenge your friends in the fun strategic word game that combines classic crosswords with the spirit of friendly competition! In Crossly™, two players take turns filling out the board, accumulating points for each correct clue by gaining a point for each letter in the clue and subtracting a point from their opponent for any of their intersecting answers. Clean design, fluid animations and playful messaging work together to make this the best crosswords experience in the App Store.
Features:
-
Endless Gameplay: Crossly pulls from tens of thousands of clues to generate unique crossword puzzles on the fly for optimal replay value. No two boards are ever alike!
-
Steal & Taunt: When you or your opponent miss a word, the other player may choose to steal for an extra turn and send a friendly taunt using animated GIFs powered by GIPHY
-
Peeks: For hard-to-guess clues, you may use one Peek per turn to reveal a letter of your choice. That letter is only visible to the player who initiates the Peek. Bonus Peeks are awarded for completing games and Peek Packs may be acquired via In-App Purchase.
-
Penciling: Penciling allows you to work on the board at any time, changing answers and adjusting your strategy as more words are completed. All penciled words are saved, even when your network connection is offline.
-
Premium Mode: Play unlimited games for free, or unlock Premium Mode for 15 bonus Peeks and colorful themes. Show your love by choosing your own price to upgrade!
This Word game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Crossly is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 30th August 2023
Recent improvements include:
- Improved Taunting feature allows users to taunt their opponents after a steal using animated GIFs powered by GIPHY.
- Optimized for newer iPhone models/OS versions
- Stability improvements
- General bug fixes
Download & Availability
Crossly 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:
It crashes when we buy stuff beware we didnt get our peeks.
Our family always has head-to-head matches going on, and its been really fun. Theres a lot of friendly rivalry that goes on inside the games and in real life as a result. Sometimes the clues dont make sense or Im pretty sure the words dont exist. But for the most part this is a very enjoyable app.
Just spins forever! Tried to have three other friends load it and no one could get it to launch. We all deleted it and give you 1 star, 0 stars would be more appropriate.
App may just not be updated for IOS 13.3. When you click on app it never loads.
This is simply the only competitive crossword app of its kind, and it does the job splendidly! There are occasional errors and quite a few very hard questions, but thats why you have two people playing and it makes it truly competitive, no matter your level. There should more people playing this.
The crosswords could be better. The words don't always make sense, like we got ohos as a word that means surprised sound we also got "randr". But most of them are good. The app however is so far super. We think we would prefer a little color. Maybe the text box or the gray boxes could be a light blue. We love being able to play with friends though and that we refreshed automatically.
We only play this with people we know, who agree to use only their minds as a resource. No looking things up on the internet, in books, or asking other friends. The app works well, but starting a match can be a little finicky. We agree to never use peeks, but the stealing mechanic is fun. All of that is overshadowed by the feeling that the puzzles are simply bad. They seem to be programmatically generated from a database of clues and answers. You end up with puzzles that lack cohesion and are often too difficult due to too much esoterica, rather than being difficult due to cleverness. On top of that, the answers can be poorly constructed and often break NYT crossword conventions.
This game is fun. The only problem we have is that it will "hide" games from us. If someone invites us to a rematch it never shows up in our game list, but still gives us a notification. So we have constant notifications on the app but when we go in to play there are no current games.
Awesome game, but we wish there were more people playing.
We think we were a bit late on the "bandwagon" we love the game, but we only ever get to do one turn due to the fact that no one else plays and there are no opponents for us to be matched up to cx pretty disappointed, we love the idea/concept of making a crossword puzzle a head-to-head multiplayer game.
We're having a blast with this app. So glad it's accessible with Voiceover screen-reader, too! :).
Enjoy playing. Great mind jogger.
We're not a fan of crossword puzzles, mainly because we're so bad at them. But the clues in this app are both funny and really clever. We love how you compete and can steal colors.
Until this app, we have never liked doing crosswords. The fact that Im pitted against other people and that we get to taunt them, makes this game very fun to play. Everything about Crossly seems well thought out. Thanks for making crosswords fun.
We love this app! Easy to cheat we guess but we won't and if others do it's their own bad sportsmanship! We highly highly recommend.
The sounds are cute and the design is nice and clean. Fun game.
Really a well thought out game. Awesome UI. Very engaging.
Fun & easy to play, but challenging enough to keep it interesting. LOVE the Taunting feature with Game Center friends.
Love the app, great and easy design. However we would love to see our stats, wins/losses, that kind of thing in an update soon.
Very fluid interface and beautifully designed.
Crosswords need a social element and this is it.
Best word game for the iPhone. More addictive than Words With Friends.
We love this game, but it seems to have been abandoned by its developers. We've had games that force closed every time we tried to play, rematches that were suddenly with a different person, and times we couldn't get into the app at all! Also when the other person stops playing, it would be nice that they lose by default.
We're having trouble with ours, in that it erased all the games we had going, we were getting errors while trying to send moves, and just crashing in the middle of gameplay. Also, when trying to start up the app, it froze in "thinking" mode (or whatever) and we never even made it to the game. We had to kill the app, and restart. When it works though, it's pretty fun. You earn hints no matter what, so it's not too hard. The only beef we have with gameplay is that it doesn't tell you how many words are smashed into the answer (above 1, obviously). That, and it would be nice to have a stats page. And to start games outside of Game Center. Seriously, who uses GC to play games? Keep up the good work! We hope to see some good updates fixing our problems, because when it works like it should, we'll be paying some money to unlock everything else! Update (12/6/14): Still crashes. Still tells us it's our turn when it's not, and vice versa. Please fix… And also maybe come up with boards that are juuuust a bit easier. We've never heard of half these words before. Thanks.
Perfect for when your looking for something less time consuming than an entire crossword puzzle. Has the competitive element of Scrabble and a surprising amount of strategy needed to defend words you've completed from your opponent who can steal your letters by completing a word using letters from a word you've just finished (think Letterpress). Four stars only because we've seen some of the longer words repeated, but we expect that will change as Mercury updates the game. Also know one of the devs there and am happy to support s game built in Nashville, Tennessee.
Need a Way to Communicate with the person your playing against.
Great game, but it really needs a chat feature. Also, although it appears as though you can resign games, in actuality you cannot, and the games just sit there forever. If these were fixed the game would be perfect.
The concept is simple and honestly executed. The sound effects are fun and the design is pleasurable to look at. Only two complains. One, force opponents to forfeit after a few days. We have at least half a dozen unfinished games in our queue for weeks. Two, some of the clues are just straight awful. Number two we can forgive — not everyone is Will Shortz. Number one seems like common sense to us for any app developer with asynchronous gameplay. Get on it, y'all.
Our only real complaint is that you can't send someone a turn reminder. We shouldn't have to choose between leaving a game unfinished because the other player hasn't made a move in a week or resigning and taking a loss on a game we are wining because they haven't played. Add a reminder after 1 day and force forfeit after 3 reminders option and this would be 5 stars from us.
We love the game but the hints are horrible. For example, a CDC Member is not a disease and short is not a hint for shy at all.
Seriously, love this game except for one thing: we're dumb! Well, not dumb, but some of these clues/answers are very advanced. We're a Monday kind of puzzle guy :) Let us choose a difficulty, and let "easy" be one of them, and it's 5 stars.
App is a lot of fun! We love making crossword puzzles competitive. Interface is beautiful and gameplay is awesome! Our only critique is that we really wish the puzzles would have themes to help your brain connect with the clues! Some of the clues can be very broad and a lot of times only include one single word as a clue. If there was a theme to the specific puzzle it would make it fun to complete the entire thing and also make it a little easier to keep a thought track and not have 6 answers to the same clue to guess. Difficulty levels would be nice as well or some sort of rank. :) good app. Look forward to updates and changes.
Great setup – works well and is fun and addictive. (And as a note to other reviewers – If the people you're playing with are cheating you need new friends. That isn't the app developers fault.) The main things we'd personally like to see – integration with the Facebook friend list (many of our friends have never registered in Game Center) and in game chat or messaging of some kind rather than just taunts. Otherwise, bravo on a solid game that's fun as long as your friends aren't cheaters. :).
We adore this game. The only thing we would change would be to have differing difficulty levels. It's just a little too challenging for most people as it is.
Such a great app and a fun game to play. We have 5 or 6 games going at the same time. Do yourself a favor and download this game.
Love this game, but the last 3 crosswords we've had have been really messed up. The words run into each other and some of the clues are mixed up (across clue is down answer). On one the board changed the second time we opened it to play. Checked for updates but there are none. Had to resign games because we couldn't make sense of the board at all. On one game had to resign because every time we tried to open it the app crashed. Hope these problems get fixed soon.
Game deleted all of our in progress games out of the blue. App still crashes a few times before finally opening as well.
To be quick, we're not a Brit. If we were, those would be 5, 6, 7 stars! We're an American, and roughly 30%-50% of each puzzle uses British lingo. E.g., CLUE: Speak – ANSWER: Uter…what!? It's utter here in the States. Others like Jewish teacher being REBBE (it's Rabbi) are just frustrating. If this game could allow Americans to create their own puzzles to submit or get some American puzzle makers it would be 5 stars all the way. Cheerio.
Great concept. Takes too long to load, often. Some answers are way too obscure. Doesn't always have a notification badge. Needs some work.
This game was fun for a while but there are a lot of repetitive clues and no puzzle themes. Also, this version needs an update for iOS 8 because it crashes EVERY TIME it initially launches.
We've found quite a few errors in various puzzles, including answers that make no sense and answers that are actually backwards. For example: we're on a puzzle now where the correct answer to a clue should be "toe" but in the puzzle it's "eot." Kind of takes the fun out of it.
There needs to be an option to have users automatically resign after they don't play for a certain amount of time (maybe a week?). It's also annoying that we can't reject invitations to play. Once we open it, all we can do is resign.
Very addictive game if you like crossword puzzles, and the clues are challenging too. If the makers could fix a few bugs it would be perfect. It doesn't always notify us when the other person has played a turn. We have to close the app and restart it. We've also had a couple of games just disappear altogether. Kind of a bummer. We're also starting to see some of the same clues already. Fix these problems and it would be a five star app.
Good game–the competition is fun. But there needs to be some sort of time limit on players making moves. Otherwise a game goes on forever.
This is a fun game and well designed, but the interaction on Game Center leaves a lot to be desired. Most frustrating is there's no way to decline a rematch, and there's no way to end a game without resigning. There are something like ten games on our screen where the opponent stopped playing, and they all take up space until we resign, thus messing up any stats.
The game is a great concept but whoever is in charge of getting the answers to some of these questions needs to be moved to another position.
Fun game, but the fact people can pay for peeks makes cheating possible (yes, peeking IS cheating).
It's a fun game, but most of the clues make no sense. We've had an easier time with a NY Times Sunday crossword.
Game is so much fun, but notifications are broken and app constantly shows app badges when it shouldn't. App also won't remove games you resign from, a bug keeps them in your "waiting for their move" list. And the only reason we have to resign is because other players quit and the game doesn't realize nor remove it. So frustrating.
Game was fun at first but then the glitches outweighed the enjoyment. Complete a game and click rematch – game starts with an arbitrary person not the one you wanted the rematch with. Playing one game and our board and clues were different than the person we were playing. Needs definite overhaul to make it fun again.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.0
- Size: 30.22 MB
- iOS: 10 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: [Mercury Intermedia, Inc.]()
Last updated: 30th August 2023 | Genre: Word, Puzzle | Developer: Mercury Intermedia, Inc.