The New York Times Games Explained

Developer:The New York Times Company
Publisher:The New York Times
Platforms:Newspaper
Web
iOS
Android
Genre:Various
Released:August 21, 2014
Modes:Single-player

The New York Times Games (NYT Games) is a collection of casual print and online games published by The New York Times, an American newspaper. Originating with the newspaper's crossword puzzle in 1942, NYT Games was officially established on August 21, 2014, with the addition of the Mini Crossword.[1] Most puzzles of The New York Times Games are published and refreshed daily, mirroring The Times' daily newspaper cadence.

The New York Times Games is part of a concerted effort by the paper to raise its digital subscription as its print-based sales dwindle.[2] [3] Since its launch, NYT Games has reached viral popularity and has become one of the main revenue drivers for The New York Times.[4] [5] As of 2024, NYT Games has over 10 million daily players across all platforms[6] and over one million premium subscribers.[7] According to one member of staff, "The half joke that is repeated internally is that The New York Times is now a gaming company that also happens to offer news."[8]

History

1942–2014: The New York Times Crossword

The New York Times has used video games as part of its journalistic efforts, among the first publications to do so,[9] contributing to an increase in Internet traffic;[10] In the late 1990s and early 2000s, The New York Times began offering its newspaper online, and along with it the crossword puzzles, allowing readers to solve puzzles on their computers. This marked the beginning of a digital expansion that would later include a variety of games beyond crosswords.

2014–2022: Release

In 2014, The New York Times officially launched The New York Times Games with the addition of the Mini Crossword. In the same year, The New York Times Magazine introduced Spelling Bee, a word game in which players guess words from a set of letters in a honeycomb and are awarded points for the length of the word and receive extra points if the word is a pangram.[11] The game was proposed by Will Shortz, created by Frank Longo, and has been maintained by Sam Ezersky. In May 2018, Spelling Bee was published on NYTimes.com, furthering its popularity.[12] In February 2019, the Times introduced Letter Boxed, in which players form words from letters placed on the edges of a square box,[13] followed in June 2019 by Tiles, a matching game in which players form sequences of tile pairings, and Vertex, in which players connect vertices to assemble an image.[14]

2022–present: Acquisition of Wordle and further growth

In January 2022, The New York Times Company acquired Wordle, a word game developed by Josh Wardle in 2021, at a valuation in the "low-seven figures".[15] The acquisition was proposed by David Perpich, a member of the Sulzberger family who proposed the purchase to Knight over Slack after reading about the game.[16] The Washington Post purportedly considered acquiring Wordle, according to Vanity Fair. At the 2022 Game Developers Conference, Wardle stated that he was overwhelmed by the volume of Wordle facsimiles and overzealous monetization practices in other games.[17] Concerns over The New York Times monetizing Wordle by implementing a paywall mounted;[18] Wordle is a client-side browser game and can be played offline by downloading its webpage.[19] Wordle moved to the Timess servers and website in February.[20] The game was added to the NYT Games application in August,[21] necessitating it be rewritten in the JavaScript library React.[22] In November, The New York Times announced that Tracy Bennett would be Wordles editor.[23]

In March 2023, the NYT Crosswords app was renamed to NYT Games to address the application's other games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Tiles, and Sudoku. According to Jonathan Knight, chief executive of The New York Times Games, the Times was concerned over how the application would rank in search results for "crossword".[24] In July 2023, The New York Times introduced Connections, in which players identify groups of words that are connected by a common property.[25] In April, the Times introduced Digits, a number-based game; Digits was shut down in August.[26]

In March 2024, The New York Times introduced the beta game Strands,[27] a word game in which players connect letters in a grid to reveal a group of words sharing a common theme.[28] It left the beta stage and became a full game in late June 2024 while also being added to the NYT Games app.[29] In August 2024, it was announced that Vertex would be discontinued at the end of the month.[30] In September 2024, The Athletic, in partnership with The New York Times Games, launched a sports edition of Connections in beta.[31] [32] The next month, Zorse, a phrase guessing game where every puzzle is a mash-up of two phrases, entered beta in Canada.[33]

List of games

Current

Active

Name! rowspan="2"
DescriptionSubscription requirement
DailyArchives & additional
The CrosswordThe Crossword is a daily crossword puzzle both online and in newspaper, syndicated to more than 300 other newspapers and journals. The puzzle is created by various freelance constructors and has been edited by Will Shortz since 1993. The crosswords are designed to increase in difficulty throughout the week, with the easiest puzzle on Monday and the most difficult on Saturday.[34] The larger Sunday crossword, which appears in The New York Times Magazine, is an icon in American culture; it is typically intended to be as difficult as a Thursday puzzle. Typically, the standard daily crossword is 15 by 15 squares, while the Sunday crossword measures 21 by 21 squares.[35] [36] colspan="2"
The Mini CrosswordThe Mini Crossword (or simply The Mini) is the smaller version of the Crossword by Joel Fagliano, which is 5×5 Sunday through Friday and 7×7 on Saturdays, and is significantly easier than the traditional daily puzzle.
Spelling BeeSpelling Bee is a word game in which players are presented with a hexagonal grid of 7 letters arrayed in a honeycomb structure. The player scores points by using the letters to form words consisting of four or more letters.
Wordle Wordle is a web-based word game created and developed by Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle. Players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with feedback given for each guess in the form of colored tiles indicating when letters match or occupy the correct position. The game was acquired by The New York Times in January 2022 for an undisclosed seven-figure sum; the game was moved to the Times website in February 2022.
StrandsStrands is a word game in which players connect letters in a grid to reveal a group of words sharing a common theme.
ConnectionsConnections is a word puzzle in which the player has four attempts to clear a grid of sixteen squares. They must select four squares at a time that fit under a specific category (e.g., dog, cat, fish, and parrot for the category "Household Pets"). It was released for PC on June 12, 2023, during its beta phase. As of 2023 it was the second most played game published by Times, behind Wordle.[37] [38] [39]
Letter BoxedLetter Boxed is a word puzzle that requires players to create words using letters around a square.
TilesTiles is a visual game in which players match identical shapes or backgrounds in every tile.
SudokuThe New York Times Games also provides Sudoku in the app and online, with puzzles split into three levels of difficulty and refreshing daily.
Variety PuzzlesIn addition to the Sunday crossword, a weekly variety puzzle appears in The New York Times Magazine. This rotates every other week between an acrostic (long written by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon) and other kinds of crosswords (cryptic, puns and anagrams, diagramless, etc.) and word puzzles of other formats (Split Decisions, Spiral, Marching Bands, etc.).[40] The variety page also includes three smaller puzzles: a Spelling Bee by Frank Longo (different from the one online), one of several word puzzle formats by Patrick Berry, and a series of Japanese-style logic puzzles by Wei-Hwa Huang and others.

Betas

Name! rowspan="2"
DescriptionSubscription requirement
DailyArchives & additional
Connections: Sports EditionConnections: Sports Edition is the sports edition of Connections which requires knowledge of teams, athletes, coaches, records, and trivia across various sports. The game was launched in beta on September 24, 2024, in collaboration with The Athletic.
ZorseZorse is a phrase guessing game where every puzzle is a mash-up of two phrases. The game's name itself references zorse, the offspring of a zebra and a horse. It entered beta in October 8, 2024 in Canada.

Former

Popularity and impact

Since its inception, The New York Times Games' player base has grown rapidly. In 2020, more than 28 million people played at least one game. Within one year from October 2022 to 2023, the number of average daily active users in the Games app tripled from 886,000 to over 2.6 million, while as of 2024, Games has over 10 million daily players across all platforms, both app and website.

NYT Games has had major impact on popular culture and discourse, including online.[45] Social media in particular contributed to its rising popularity, with users posting their NYT Games' puzzle results en masse thanks to Games' ease of sharing. Wordle results were shared 1.2 million times on Twitter (now X) between January 1 and 13 of 2022,[46] while Connections results similarly trending.[47] On TikTok as of May 2024, 140,000 videos with the hashtag #wordle were present, with videos about Connections "regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views".[48] Accounts dedicated to solving NYT Games crosswords and puzzles amassed millions of followers, with several figures converting these accounts into full-time jobs.

Thanks to its popularity, some NYT Games' editors reached celebrity status, such as Will Shortz, the NYT Crossword editor since 1993; Sam Ezersky, editor of Spelling Bee; Wyna Liu, editor of Connections; and Tracy Bennett, editor of Wordle. Some editors get tagged frequently on Twitter by their game's "die-hard" fan base, albeit sometimes negatively due to complaints about the day's puzzle construction itself.[49]

Games has become one of the main revenue drivers for The New York Times.[50] As of 2023, NYT Games has "over one million" premium subscribers, with then chief product officer Alex Hardiman credited Games as one of the large factor in the Times' overarching news subscriber growth, mentioning "a lot of people are actually buying the bundle through our Games product." In an SEC filing, Games has more popularity and interaction than any other products The New York Times offers, including its core news offering. According to one member of staff, "The half joke that is repeated internally is that The New York Times is now a gaming company that also happens to offer news," as reportedly "[p]eople who engage with both news and games on any given week have the best long-term subscriber retention of any product combination". First-party advertising campaigns on NYT Games website have above-average level of awareness, attributed to "the brief nature of the Times’ puzzles, which are designed to be completed in a matter of minutes, [which] also means they elicit a heightened level of focus from players".

Notes and References

  1. News: Fagliano . Joel . March 26, 2019 . A Mini History of Our Mini Crossword . February 26, 2024 . The New York Times . en-US . 0362-4331.
  2. News: March 18, 2021 . Facing Post-Trump Slowdown, New York Times Eyes $100 Billion Games Market . February 26, 2024 . Bloomberg.com . en.
  3. Web site: 2024-04-01 . Thanks To Hits Like Wordle, The New York Times Is Now A Gaming Company . 2024-04-28 . Kotaku . en.
  4. Web site: Maher . Bron . March 23, 2023 . How games are powering online subscriptions at The New York Times . February 26, 2024 . Press Gazette . en-US.
  5. News: Robertson . Katie . 2024-02-07 . New York Times Co. Adds 300,000 Digital Subscribers in Quarter . 2024-04-28 . The New York Times . en-US . 0362-4331.
  6. Web site: Stenberg . Mark . 2024-02-06 . With Games Advertising, The New York Times Is Pitching Habit . 2024-06-13 . www.adweek.com . en-US.
  7. Web site: Joseph . Seb . March 22, 2023 . 'The next level for us': The New York Times eyes better retention for games in subscription drive . February 26, 2024 . Digiday . en-US.
  8. Klein . Charlotte . 2023-12-19 . Inside The New York Times' Big Bet on Games . 2024-05-08 . Vanity Fair . en-US.
  9. Gómez-García . Salvador . de la Hera Conde-Pumpido . Teresa . June 2023 . Newsgames: The Use of Digital Games by Mass-Media Outlets to Convey Journalistic Messages . . 18 . 4 . 451 . 10.1177/15554120221105461 . 258568580 . December 16, 2023.
  10. Book: Usher, Nikki . 2014 . Making News at the New York Times . Ann Arbor . . 9780472035960. 150.
  11. Web site: The Genius of Spelling Bee . October 16, 2020 . Amlen . Deb . The New York Times . January 14, 2024.
  12. Web site: The NYT Spelling Bee Gives Me L-I-F-E . February 19, 2020 . Lippman . Laura . . January 14, 2024.
  13. Web site: New York Times develops new word game for crossword section . February 1, 2019 . Sarkar . Samit . . January 14, 2024.
  14. Web site: Tiles and Sudoku Join NYT Games App . May 16, 2023 . . January 14, 2024 .
  15. Web site: New York Times Buys Wordle . January 31, 2022 . Pisani . Joseph . . January 12, 2024.
  16. Web site: He Pushed the New York Times to Buy Wordle. Now He Has to Make Sports Work. . July 9, 2023 . Bruell . Alexander . . October 30, 2023 .
  17. Web site: Wordle creator describes game's rise, says NYT sale was "a way to walk away" . March 25, 2022 . Machkovech . Sam . . January 13, 2024.
  18. Web site: Wordle buyout by New York Times draws backlash from fans . February 1, 2022 . Mukherjee . Supantha . Datta . Tiyashi . . January 13, 2024.
  19. Web site: Wordle will be free forever because you can right-click to save the whole game . February 1, 2022 . Hollister . Sean . . January 13, 2024.
  20. Web site: Wordle streaks return for some players impacted by NYT migration . February 10, 2022 . Carpenter . Nicole . . January 13, 2024.
  21. Web site: Wordle snags a place inside the New York Times Crossword app . August 24, 2022 . Hicks . Jasmine . . January 13, 2024.
  22. Web site: How The New York Times managed to avoid ruining Wordle . March 24, 2023 . Orland . Kyle . . January 13, 2024.
  23. Web site: How "Wordle editor" became a real job at The New York Times. November 12, 2022 . Orland . Kyle . . January 13, 2024.
  24. Web site: The New York Times' push into games meant a major change for its crosswords app . May 30, 2023 . Peters . Jay . . January 14, 2024 .
  25. Web site: NYT 'Connections', and the company's quest to create the next 'Wordle' . August 15, 2023 . Morris . Chris . . January 14, 2024.
  26. Web site: The New York Times is shutting down its math-based puzzle game . July 18, 2023 . Peters . Jay . . January 14, 2024 .
  27. Web site: Bogost . Ian . March 6, 2024 . The New York Times' New Game Is Genius . March 9, 2024 . . en.
  28. News: Levine . Elie . March 4, 2024 . Putting a New Twist on a Classic Puzzle . March 6, 2024 . The New York Times . en-US . 0362-4331.
  29. Web site: Cooper . Gael . June 26, 2024 . NYT Games Moves Strands Out of Beta and Into the Official App . June 28, 2024 . CNet.
  30. Web site: Mason . Everdeen . August 8, 2024 . Editor’s Note: Goodbye, Vertex . August 14, 2024 . The New York Times.
  31. Web site: Effress . Sarah . September 24, 2024 . What is Connections: Sports Edition? Explaining the new twist on New York Times' viral game . October 31, 2024 . Sporting News.
  32. Web site: Cooper . Mark . September 25, 2024 . Try playing The Athletic’s first game, Connections: Sports Edition, now in beta . October 31, 2024 . The Athletic.
  33. Web site: Peters . Jay . 2024-10-08 . NYT Games is testing Zorse, a new ‘phrase guessing’ puzzle game . 2024-10-13 . The Verge.
  34. News: Shortz . Will . April 8, 2001 . ENDPAPER: HOW TO; Solve The New York Times Crossword Puzzle . September 6, 2022 . The New York Times . en-US . 0362-4331.
  35. Web site: Crossword Puzzle Archive - 1999 - Premium - NYTimes.com . September 6, 2022 . www.nytimes.com.
  36. Web site: New York Times Specification Sheet . September 6, 2022 . www.cruciverb.com.
  37. News: Valinsky . Jordan . August 28, 2023 . Move over Wordle, the New York Times might have found its next hit game . September 4, 2023 . CNN Business.
  38. News: Miller . Chance . August 28, 2023 . 'Connections' puzzle game comes to NYT Games app on iPhone and iPad . September 4, 2023 . 9to5Mac.
  39. News: Silberling . Amanda . August 28, 2023 . Connections is The New York Times' most played game after Wordle . September 4, 2023 . TechCrunch.
  40. Web site: Shortz . Will . February 19, 2015 . Good Puzzle News in The New York Times Magazine . February 26, 2024 . The New York Times.
  41. News: Amlen . Deb . April 10, 2023 . How We Make Games at The Times . February 26, 2024 . The New York Times . en-US . 0362-4331.
  42. Web site: Peters . Jay . April 10, 2023 . You can try The New York Times' new math-based puzzle game right now . February 26, 2024 . The Verge . en.
  43. News: 2023-04-11 . Following Wordle success, NYT debuts Countdown-like number game Digits . 2024-06-13 . Eurogamer.net . en.
  44. News: Christopher Livingston . 2023-04-10 . Wordle players should try this new daily puzzle from the New York Times . 2024-06-13 . PC Gamer . en.
  45. Web site: A Cultural Phenomenon: The Intellectual Appeal of NYT Puzzle Games Arts The Harvard Crimson . February 26, 2024 . www.thecrimson.com.
  46. Web site: Hall . Rachel . January 11, 2022 . Wordle creator overwhelmed by global success of hit puzzle . live . https://web.archive.org/web/20220111173024/https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/11/wordle-creator-overwhelmed-by-global-success-of-hit-puzzle . January 11, 2022 . January 11, 2022 . The Guardian.
  47. Web site: Jennings . Rebecca . 2024-03-26 . Connections, the most fun (and sometimes frustrating) game on the internet . 2024-06-13 . Vox . en-US.
  48. Web site: Dazed . 2024-05-14 . Why is everyone so obsessed with puzzle games now? . 2024-06-13 . Dazed . en.
  49. Web site: Will. Shortz '77. Writes. One. Word. At. A. Time . 2024-06-13 . University of Virginia School of Law.
  50. Web site: Fitzpatrick . Alex . January 29, 2024 . Games are helping the New York Times thrive amid media chaos . Axios.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "The New York Times Games".

Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is © Copyright 2009-2025, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Cookie policy.