Terms of service
The rules of using Crossly. They are short, and none of them is a surprise: play fairly, do not attack the service, and understand that a free crossword game comes with no guarantees about uptime.
Last updated 26 August 2026
1. This agreement
These terms are between you and the Crossly team ("we", "us"), who operate Crossly. By playing — as a guest or with an account — you accept them. If you do not, please do not use the service.
Our privacy policy explains what we do with your data and forms part of this agreement.
2. Your account
- You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account. There is no age requirement to play as a guest, because guest play involves no account at all.
- Give an email address that is genuinely yours. Scoring is enabled once you confirm it.
- One person, one account. Extra accounts created to farm the leaderboard will be removed.
- You are responsible for your password and for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has got into it.
- Choose a display name you would be happy to see on a public leaderboard. We may change or clear a name that is abusive, impersonates somebody, or is chosen to mislead.
3. Fair play
The leaderboard is the point of the game, so the things that would ruin it are the things you may not do. Specifically, do not:
- automate play, script the grid, or use any program to solve, submit, or speed up levels;
- interfere with the timing of an attempt, or try to submit a result the game did not produce;
- try to extract the answers other than by solving — they are held on the server for exactly this reason;
- make the ad breaks or the reveal rewards pay out without the advert having actually been shown;
- attack, overload, probe or reverse-engineer the service, or attempt to reach accounts or data that are not yours;
- scrape or bulk-copy the puzzles, the clues or the leaderboard.
Where we find a score was not honestly obtained we may remove it, reset the account, or close it. Where the behaviour is clearly deliberate we will not warn first.
4. Advertising
Crossly is free. There is nothing to buy, no subscription and no in-app purchase; advertising is what pays for it. Adverts appear between levels — after every 2 levels as a guest and every 5 with an account — and when you choose to reveal a word.
Revealing a word requires the advert to actually play. If it does not, the word is not revealed and nothing is deducted from your score. We do not offer another way to buy a reveal.
You may use an ad blocker. It will stop reveals working and will stop levels behind an ad break from opening, because there is no fallback — that is a consequence of blocking, not a penalty we apply.
We may change how often adverts appear, or which network serves them. Material changes are announced on the help page and, for privacy-affecting ones, in the privacy policy first.
5. What you post
The only things you can put into Crossly are a display name, a profile picture and a message through the contact form. You keep ownership of them, and you give us permission to show your display name and picture where the game displays them — chiefly the leaderboard and your profile.
Do not upload anything you do not have the right to use, or anything unlawful, hateful or obscene. We may remove it and close the account.
6. Ownership and licences
The game, its design, its code and the assembled puzzles belong to us. You get a personal, non-transferable licence to play, and nothing more: you may not copy, resell, republish or redistribute the puzzles or run your own service from them.
The answers and clues are derived from Princeton WordNet and are used under the WordNet licence. Princeton University makes no warranty about that material and is not connected with this game. The attribution in our footer is a condition of that licence and stays there.
7. Availability
We try to keep 300 levels online and working, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. Maintenance, outages at our suppliers, and plain bugs all happen.
We may add, change, regrade or withdraw levels. Where a puzzle is materially changed, scores set against the old version are archived rather than deleted — they stop counting towards the ranking, because a score is only comparable against the puzzle it was set on.
Attempts left idle for more than 5 minutes are discarded and score nothing. That is by design; it is what stops a level being paused mid-solve to bank a fast time.
8. Ending it
You can stop at any time, and you can ask us to delete your account with it.
We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, and we may withdraw the service entirely — in which case we will give account holders reasonable notice at the address on file where we can.
9. Liability
The service is provided as it is. To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties, and we are not liable for lost progress, lost scores, lost time, or any indirect or consequential loss.
Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.
Guest progress is stored in your browser tab and is not backed up anywhere. It is lost when the tab closes, which the game tells you on every guest level.
10. Law and changes
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and its courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, you keep the protection of the mandatory law of your own country.
We may update these terms. The date at the top changes when we do, and significant changes are notified to account holders by email. Continuing to play after a change means you accept it.
If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
Questions about any of this: the contact form.