The Hearst Newspapers News-sites, no doubt jealous of the NYT's
puzzle section, have launched their own syndicated puzzle page, Puzzmo.
Each day there's a cool mini-crossword from the AVCX folks and
some other puzzles.
(I don't think you need to subscribe to a Hearst news-site to play the puzzles.
When I tried visiting in Incognito just now, it let me get started on the crossword.
To play some of their "experimental" and "bonus" puzzles, you need to join Puzzmo;
as near as I can tell, that's separate from being a Hearst news-site subscriber, maybe?)
I got mad at a couple of their word puzzles because they leaned on some obscure words. E.g., I got stuck on a Typeshift puzzle and asked for a hint. The hint told me I should have used the word motlier. Motlier. As in "Look at that motley fool and the motlier fool next to him," I guess. I didn't want to have to use a desperate-Scrabble-ploy word to solve a puzzle.
I enjoyed solving the clever crosswords. I wasn't having fun solving the Typeshift and Wordbind puzzles, knowing that my scores would always be trounced by folks who could stomach using words like motlier. (Scrabble champs would no doubt point out that the real problem is that I'm unwilling to put in the work to memorize those weird words. Anyhow.)
Instead, I wrote a couple of little computer programs to solve those puzzles for me. That was fun. I set them up to favor using actual-words-that-people-use; but fall back to words-never-uttered-outside-a-Scrabble-board.
Unfortunately solving those puzzles still isn't fun, even with the helper programs… So I stopped. But I still visit the site each day for the cool crossword.
