The New York Times game series has recently seen a surge in popularity. With hits including the Mini, Connections, Wordle, Sudoku and Strands, people have been spending more and more time on these daily puzzles.
For many, these games have become part of their daily routines. When students have downtime, during free periods and break, many students can be seen playing these games. This is not the first time the New York Times has been popular at Pace, however.
The Wordle came out in 2022, and it immediately became a hit at Pace. Students across different grades could be seen playing these games, with competition to see who could get the word in the shortest amount of guesses. With the Wordle’s repetitive format, it gradually dwindled in popularity as the daily format became stale to many.
Earlier this year, however, these games seemed to suddenly be popular again. A major reason for this change was the introduction of the Connections. Coming out in June 2023, the Connections is a matching game with 16 words. These terms can be sorted by specific categories into groups of four. This simple format combined with the new words every day keeps the game engaging and fun.
Additionally, the New York Times introduced a new game in early March this year. The strands is a wordsearch puzzle with a theme or ‘Spanagram’ linking all of the words. The other words the user will find can be used to contribute to a hint, with three words leading to one hint. This hint will highlight the letters of a target word, allowing the user to complete the puzzle with less difficulty.
The New York Times has also seen success outside of Pace. According to Axios, the New York Times games were played more than 8 million times in 2023, with Wordle having 4.8 million plays. Additionally, the New York Times has created an app that has been downloaded more than 10 million times.
“What we do uniquely, I think, is have a human-made, human-curated, high degree of editorial rigor and quality standards, and fact-checking and editors upon editors — and we’re at a scale where we can really mount that kind of human effort to get behind our puzzles,” said Head of NYT Games Jonathan Knight.
Not all of the New York Times games have been successful, however. Digits was a math based puzzle game introduced in 2021, though it has been discontinued since. The concept of the game was for the player to reach the target number using the given numbers and the four basic operations.
The New York Times Games catalog is going to remain relatively small in order to maintain game quality. “We want to be known for a handful of high-quality, human-made puzzles, with a daily solve, that reach as many people as we can,” said Knight.
