With eight different levels on offer, each will provide you with a list of ten different puzzles that need to be solved, from the obvious ("Man's Best Friend - The travelling business man needs a companion"), to the slightly more cryptic ("The Band Played On - One musician is not like the others"). The game's Sandbox mode, on the other hand, is much more puzzle based, and offers more freedom. The game's titular Showdown mode bundles these mini-games up into a boardgame, where winning mini-games will let you progress around the board. In Super Sprint, you have to ride your creation down a race track, and might have to think of an animal (or person) beginning with N, for example while in Drone Drop, you'll need to think of the heaviest item you can that begins with a certain letter, before attempting to deliver it by drone to a number of bases around the map. Wordy games, on the other hand, make use of the game's dictionary.
Speedy games don't involve the game's dictionary, and instead see you running around with a basket to collect apples falling from the sky, or throwing a clock to your opponent in the hope that you're not left holding it when it goes off.
These in themselves are divided into two different types - Speedy, and Wordy.
On the one hand, you have the mini-games - a collection of over two dozen quickfire, competitive games that see you and a friend face off against each other - or see you taking on the computer. Scribblenauts Showdown is a game very much divided into two halves.