Spell out the message one cut-out letter at a time, but every scrap costs money, and the cheap ones look terrible.
Ransom is a budget-juggling word puzzle. The day's message is laid out as a row of empty slots, and your job is to fill every letter by buying a tile for it. Each tile comes in five qualities: quality 1 is the cheapest, ugliest scrap and quality 5 is clean and pricey. You must fill the whole message, stay under budget, and squeeze out as much legibility as you can, then send the note and see how your score stacks up against par.
The premise is a real typographic phenomenon. The ransom note effect is what you get from too many juxtaposed typefaces, and it is named for the stereotypical note assembled from letters cut out of magazines to avoid recognisable handwriting.
The original design turns that into economics: every letter of the day's message must be bought, in one of five qualities, under a fixed budget.
So the game is about where illegibility is affordable. A note is read as a whole, and a cheap letter in a short common word costs the reader almost nothing while the same saving inside an unusual word can sink the sentence — which makes this a spelling puzzle whose real subject is redundancy in English.
Ransom is an original free browser word game that turns spelling into an economics puzzle: a fixed message, a tight budget, and a tradeoff between cost and clarity on every single letter. No download or sign-up required.