# The New York Times Games

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. 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. Since its launch, NYT Games has reached viral popularity and has become one of the main revenue drivers for The New York Times. As of 2024, NYT Games has over 10 million daily players across all platforms and over one million premium subscribers. 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."

## History
### 1942–2014: The New York Times Crossword

Although crosswords became popular in the early 1920s, The New York Times initially considered them frivolous, calling them "a primitive form of mental exercise", and did not run a crossword until February 15, 1942, in its Sunday edition. It was published under a pseudonym Farrar occasionally used, "Anna Gram".
The New York Times has used video games as part of its journalistic efforts, among the first publications to do so, contributing to an increase in Internet traffic; 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. 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. In February 2019, the Times introduced Letter Boxed, in which players form words from letters placed on the edges of a square box, 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.

### 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". 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. 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. Concerns over The New York Times monetizing Wordle by implementing a paywall mounted; Wordle is a client-side browser game and can be played offline by downloading its webpage. Wordle moved to the Times's servers and website in February. The game was added to the NYT Games application in August, necessitating it be rewritten in the JavaScript library React. In November, The New York Times announced that Tracy Bennett would be Wordle's editor.
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". In July 2023, The New York Times introduced Connections, in which players identify groups of words that are connected by a common property. In April, the Times introduced Digits, a number-based game; Digits was shut down in August.
In March 2024, The New York Times introduced the beta game Strands, a word game in which players connect letters in a grid to reveal a group of words sharing a common theme. It left the beta stage and became a full game in late June 2024 while also being added to the NYT Games app. In August 2024, it was announced that Vertex would be discontinued at the end of the month. In September 2024, The Athletic, in partnership with The New York Times Games, launched a sports edition of Connections in beta. The next month, Zorse, a phrase guessing game where every puzzle is a mash-up of two phrases, entered beta in Canada. Connections: Sports Edition officially launched on February 9, 2025, to coincide with Super Bowl LIX.

## List of games
### Current
#### Active

Current active New York Times Games :
| Name | Description | Subscription requirement | Subscription requirement |
| Name | Description | Daily | Archives & additional |
| The Crossword | The 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. 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. | Yes | Yes |
| The Mini Crossword | The 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. | No | Yes |
| Spelling Bee | Spelling 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. | No until "Solid" rank; Yes after | Yes |
| 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. | No | Yes (for archive) |
| Strands | Strands is a word game in which players connect letters in a grid to reveal a group of words sharing a common theme. | No | — |
| Connections | Connections 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. | No | Yes (for archive) |
| Connections: Sports Edition | Connections: 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, and formally launched on February 9, 2025. With the game's official launch, an optional timer for completing the puzzle was added. | No | — |
| Letter Boxed | Letter Boxed is a word puzzle that requires players to create words using letters around a square. | No | Yes (for unlimited play) |
| Tiles | Tiles is a visual game in which players match identical shapes or backgrounds in every tile. | No | Yes (for unlimited play and Zen Mode) |
| Sudoku | The New York Times Games also provides Sudoku in the app and online, with puzzles split into three levels of difficulty and refreshing daily. | No | Yes |
| Variety Puzzles | In 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.). 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

Current beta New York Times Games :
| Name | Description | Subscription requirement | Subscription requirement |
| Name | Description | Daily | Archives & additional |
| Zorse | Zorse 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. It was discontinued on January 13, 2025. | No | — |

### Former

Former New York Times Games :
| Name | Description |
| Digits | Digits was a number puzzle in which players used six provided numbers and basic arithmetic (add, subtract, multiply, or divide) to reach as close to the target number as possible. Each number can only be used once. The game was launched in beta on April 10, 2023, and was shut down on August 8, 2023. Several publications commented on Digits' similarity to the "numbers" round of the British game show Countdown and its original French version, Des chiffres et des lettres. |
| Vertex | Vertex was a subscription-only visual game in which players draw lines between points to create triangles, eventually revealing a hidden image. The game was one of the earlier games that was part of NYT Games growing success, offered since at least 2020. Vertex was retired in August 2024, with the last playable game August 29. |

## 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. 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, 2022, while Connections results similarly trending. 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". 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.
Games has become one of the main revenue drivers for The New York Times. 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".