The New York Times Games
The New York Times 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
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
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.2022–2024: Acquisition of ''Wordle''
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 Timess 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 Wordles 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.
2024–present: Further growth
In 2024, NYT Games playerbase grew exponentially. In June 2025, according to official statistics of the previous year shared with The Verge by New York Times spokesperson Jordan Cohen, NYT Games puzzles were played 11.1 billion times, while Wordle, Connections, and Strands were played 5.3 billion, 3.3 billion, and 1.3 billion times, respectively.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.
On April 18, 2025, Pips, a logic puzzle in which players place dominoes on a gameboard in order to satisfy certain conditions, entered beta in Canada; On June 10, 2025, NYT Crossplay, a multiplayer word game with gameplay similar to Scrabble and Words with Friends, was launched in beta in New Zealand on iOS. Crossplay is their first standalone app outside the NYT Games app. On August 18, 2025, Pips left beta and was officially launched; the launch made Pips the second logic puzzle besides Sudoku on NYT Games, and its first original logic puzzle. By the end of August 2025, the Mini Crossword was changed from free-to-play to requiring a subscription to play daily, with Tiles and Letter Boxed also moving behind the subscription. Additionally, the Spelling Bee no longer allowed players to play for free to the "Good" or "Solid" levels, instead only allowing a few word plays before requiring a subscription. In September 2025, a Strands archive was introduced. Crossplay left beta and launched in the United States on January 21, 2026.
List of games
''The New York Times Magazine'' variety puzzles
In addition to the primary crossword, the Times publishes a second Sunday puzzle each week of varying types in The New York Times Magazine. Currently, every other week features a rotating selection, including an acrostic ; other kinds of crosswords ; word puzzles of other formats ; and, more rarely, other types.As well as a second word puzzle on Sundays, the Times publishes a KenKen numbers puzzle each day of the week. The variety page also includes three smaller puzzles: a Spelling Bee by Frank Longo, one of several word puzzle formats by Patrick Berry, and a series of Japanese-style logic puzzles by Wei-Hwa Huang and others. The Times also offers a monthly bonus crossword with a theme relating to the month.
Acrostic puzzles
The acrostic, in particular, has the longest history. The puzzle began publishing on May 9, 1943, authored by Elizabeth S. Kingsley, who is credited with inventing the puzzle type, and continued to write the Times acrostic until December 28, 1952. From then until August 13, 1967, it was written by Kingsley's former assistant, Doris Nash Wortman; then it was taken over by Thomas H. Middleton for a period of over 30 years, until August 15, 1999, when the pair of Cox and Rathvon became just the fourth author of the puzzle in its history. The name of the puzzle also changed over the years, from "Double-Crostic" to "Kingsley Double-Crostic", "Acrostic Puzzle", and, finally since 1991, just "Acrostic".Popularity
Playerbase
Since its inception, The New York Times GamesSocial
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 GamesThanks to its popularity, some NYT Games
Impact
Cognitive
The rise in popularity of the NYT Games has led to increased interest in the cognitive impact daily games have on the people playing them. Regularly playing games like Connections and Crosswords require classification, pattern recognition, and problem-solving, helping players develop mental flexibility. Even if players don’t solve a puzzle specifically, they often expand their knowledge by learning new words or concepts. Another cognitive benefit is overcoming mental resistance. Connections pushes players to engage in difficult tasks, challenging the human tendency to avoid discomfort. This mental exercise strengthens perseverance and adaptability, which are valuable cognitive skills. Beyond these skill enhancements, regular puzzle-solving has been associated with slower brain shrinkage, particularly in the hippocampus and cortex, with crossword solvers showing 0.5% to 1% less shrinkage over 18 months. While there are proven cognitive benefits for older adults, the impact on people with normal cognition is less studied. However, the problem-solving and memory benefits likely extend to younger individuals as well and can serve as a productive break from passive screen time, providing mental stimulation instead of aimless scrolling.User experience research
The New York Times Games employs editors and a structured research process to develop and refine its games. For games like Wordle, editor Tracy Bennett works roughly one month in advance, and spends around two hours every week selecting and arranging the upcoming words for the game. The process involves randomly selecting candidate words from a database, researching their meanings, and evaluating the different letter combinations to identify potential "lucky guess" words that could take on user strategy.User feedback also plays a key role in the development process. The Times collects responses from players through various forms such as community forums, social media, and direct emails. From there, they review this feedback weekly to identify any recurring concerns or themes. In response to player feedback, specifically through experiments with holiday-related words, the Times decided to avoid themed puzzles for Wordle as they received negative responses from players who felt it disrupted the game's random nature.
Since early 2023, the Times has implemented an external testing process for Wordle and other games. Approximately 35 testers receive puzzles three to four weeks before public release. Their role is to provide feedback that helps decide difficulty levels and establish variety through puzzles. Along with qualitative feedback, the development team also utilizes quantitative data such as solve rates to guide improvements that balance analytics and creativity.
According to Everdeen Mason, editorial director for NYT Games, "Data is very important in what we do... But I really want to have a lot of creative freedom and passion, because I think it does make the puzzles better."
The New York Times Games team occasionally publishes research about technical experiments it conducts. In 2024, NYT Games AI Engineer Shafik Quoraishee published an in depth article on introducing handwriting recognition via on-device AI models onto the New York Times Games App Crosswords. Shafik and Wyna have also collaborated on building tools that aide puzzle analysis and research for Connections. The Times has also published details on experimentation regarding Connections and graph neural networks.