The New York Times Games (NYT Games) offers a variety of casual print and online games published by The New York Times newspaper. It started with the crossword puzzle in 1942 and officially launched on August 21, 2014, when the Mini Crossword was added. Most of these puzzles are updated daily just like The Times’ daily newspaper.
NYT Games is part of The New York Times’ strategy to increase digital subscriptions as print sales decline. Since its launch, these games have become a significant source of revenue for the company. As of 2023, NYT Games has more than one million subscribers.
History
1942–2014: The New York Times Crossword
Crossword puzzles became popular in the early 1920s, but The New York Times didn’t start publishing them until 1942. The paper initially saw crosswords as silly and called them “a primitive form of mental exercise.” However, the first crossword puzzle appeared in the Sunday edition on February 15, 1942, under the pseudonym Anna Gram which was sometimes used by the editor Farrar.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor motivated The Times to start publishing crosswords. On December 18, 1941, an editor wrote a memo suggesting that during such troubling times, readers might need something to do during blackouts and the puzzle could provide that distraction. The crossword became popular quickly and even the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who had been a fan of crosswords for years, wrote a puzzle that year.
The New York Times was also one of the first publications to use video games in its journalism helping to boost its online traffic. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, The Times began offering its newspaper and crossword puzzles online allowing readers to solve puzzles on their computers. This move was the start of their digital expansion which eventually included a variety of games beyond crosswords.
2014–2022: Release
In 2014, The New York Times launched The New York Times Games, starting with the Mini Crossword. That same year, The New York Times Magazine introduced Spelling Bee, a word game where players make words from a set of letters arranged in a honeycomb shape, earning points based on the length of the words and extra points for pangrams. The game was proposed by Will Shortz, created by Frank Longo and maintained by Sam Ezersky. Spelling Bee was added to NYTimes.com in May 2018, boosting its popularity.
In February 2019, The Times launched Letter Boxed, a game where players form words using letters on the edges of a square box. In June 2019, they introduced two more games: Tiles, where players match tile pairs and Vertex, where players connect dots to form an image.
2022–Present: Acquisition of Wordle & Further Growth
In January 2022, The New York Times Company bought Wordle, a word game created by Josh Wardle in 2021, for a price in the “low-seven figures.” David Perpich a member of the Sulzberger family suggested the purchase to Knight over Slack after reading about the game.
The Washington Post also considered buying Wordle. At the 2022 Game Developers Conference, Wardle mentioned he was overwhelmed by the many copycat versions and aggressive monetization of similar games. People worried that The New York Times might put Wordle behind a paywall but it remains a client-side browser game that can be played offline by downloading its webpage.
Wordle moved to The Times’s servers and website in February and it was added to the NYT Games app in August, requiring it to be rewritten using the JavaScript library React.
In November, The New York Times announced Tracy Bennett as Wordle’s editor.
In March 2023, NYT Crosswords was renamed NYT Games to reflect the app’s variety of games including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Tiles and Sudoku. Jonathan Knight, chief executive of The New York Times Games said they wanted the app to rank better in search results for “crossword.”
In July 2023, The New York Times introduced Connections, a game where players find groups of words with a common theme.
In April, they launched Digits, a number-based game which was shut down in August.
In March 2024, The New York Times introduced the beta game Strands, a word game where players connect letters in a grid to find words with a common theme.
List of Games
Current
| Name | Description | Subscription Required for Daily Use | Subscription Required for Archives & Additional Features |
| The Crossword | A daily crossword puzzle available both online and in the newspaper, syndicated to over 300 other publications. Created by freelance constructors and edited by Will Shortz since 1993, puzzles get harder from Monday to Saturday. The Sunday crossword in The New York Times Magazine is iconic. | Yes | Yes |
| The Mini Crossword | A smaller version of the Crossword by Joel Fagliano, 5×5 squares Sunday through Friday and 7×7 on Saturdays, much easier than the traditional puzzle. | No | Yes |
| Spelling Bee | A word game with a hexagonal grid of 7 letters. Players form words of four or more letters to score points. | No (until “Solid” rank); Yes after | Yes |
| Wordle | A word game where players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with feedback on letter positions. Acquired by The New York Times in January 2022, it remains free. | No | — |
| Connections | A word puzzle where players clear a grid of 16 squares by selecting four at a time that fit a specific category. Released in beta in June 2023 and is the second most played game after Wordle. | No | — |
| Letter Boxed | A word puzzle where players create words using letters around a square. | No | Yes (for unlimited play) |
| Tiles | A visual game where players match identical shapes or backgrounds in tiles. | No | Yes (for unlimited play and Zen Mode) |
| Vertex | A visual game where players draw lines between points to create triangles, revealing a hidden image. | Yes | — |
| Sudoku | Daily Sudoku puzzles available online and in the app, with three levels of difficulty. | No | Yes |
| Strands | A word game where players connect letters in a grid to find words with a common theme. | No | — |
| Variety Puzzles | Weekly puzzles in The New York Times Magazine, rotating between different types like acrostics, cryptic crosswords and more. Also includes three smaller puzzles: a different Spelling Bee by Frank Longo, word puzzles by Patrick Berry, and Japanese-style logic puzzles by Wei-Hwa Huang. | — | — |
Former
| Name | Description |
| Digits | Digits was a number puzzle where players used six given numbers and basic arithmetic (add, subtract, multiply, divide) to get as close to a target number as possible, with each number used only once. It launched in beta on April 10, 2023, and was discontinued on August 8, 2023. |
Cultural Impact
Since it started, The New York Times Games has influenced popular conversations especially online. It has also become a major source of revenue for The New York Times.
With puzzles, we aim to provide our audience with the same level of quality and excellence that they expect from our journalism. – Jonathan Knight, General Manager, The New York Times Games
