All the news about daily puzzle games

There's a lot of interest in daily puzzle games right now. The New York Times has a great collection of games like its crossword, Wordle, Connections, and Strands. Apple is in the mix with crosswords and more in Apple News Plus. Zach Gage's puzzle gaming platform Puzzmo has some fun twists on classic games and was acquired by Hearst. Even LinkedIn has games now, and it turns out that they're actually good.

Sure, the games are fun, but they can also be reliable ways for the companies that offer them to make money from subscriptions. The New York Times puts a some features for its games behind a paywall. Apple's games are only available to Apple News Plus subscribers. And Netflix is launching a daily word game to bolster its paid subscription for mobile games.

Here's all of our coverage of news and word games. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to try to finish Connections without throwing my phone into the ocean.

The New York Times is starting to beta test a new puzzle game called "Zorse," as reported by Semafor. The game is a "new phrase guessing game where every puzzle is a mash-up of two phrases," NYT spokesperson Jordan Cohen says in a statement to The Verge. As Semafor points out, the Zorse name "identifies the offspring of a zebra and another equine," so it seems like the game will focus on wordplay like that.

Cohen says Zorse is currently only available in Canada, meaning I can't play it myself. But my Canada-based colleague Andrew Webster gave it a shot and told me about it; the game sounds a bit like Wheel of Fortune with a puzzle-y twist.

Wordle now has a native app for Meta Quest so that you can easily play the game in virtual reality. The free app is available for Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, and Meta Quest Pro.

Based on screenshots in a Meta blog post and an NYT video, the game looks like, well, Wordle in VR: you'll have six attempts to guess a five-letter word. But if you have wanted to play the game in an app on your Quest, that's now something you can do.

Everyone seems to want in on newspaper-style casual gaming. While The New York Times is leading the way with Wordle and its iconic crossword, major companies ranging from Netflix to LinkedIn are trying to carve out a place as well. So, when game designer Zach Gage, cofounder of the Hearst-owned site Puzzmo, started exploring the space, he knew the project needed more than great games. He says the goal was to "design a website that isn't just links to games but is in fact a deeper community experience." That's why Puzzmo launched last year with a handful of titles and multiplayer features like leaderboards.

Now both of those aspects are expanding with a new game that's also introducing new ways to play - inspired by some of the biggest online shooters around.

Strands, The New York Times' very good word search game, has been officially added to the NYT's Games app on iOS and Android.

For me personally, this is huge. Strands has become my favorite of the NYT's games since it launched in beta in March, but I was annoyed that I had to bounce between the app and a browser to complete my daily Wordle, Connections, and Strands. Now, I can do all of the puzzles right in the app over my morning coffee. It's the little things!

Wordle is a pretty clever name for the very good word game created by Josh Wardle. But when he was first working on it in 2013, Wardle had another name in mind that isn't quite as catchy.

"This is true: I was going to call Wordle, Mr. Bugs' Wordy Nugz," Wardle revealed as part of a presentation about Wordle at Figma's Config conference on Wednesday. He also showed a slide that spelled out the name in big yellow letters. "Had I called the game Mr. Bugs, I like to think it would not have been successful."

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I'm kidding! But I have to admit something: I've been going on LinkedIn every day recently, and I'm having a great time. Last week, the company announced it was adding three games to its app, both on desktop and mobile, as a naked engagement ploy to get you to open the app every day. I hate to say this, but it's working.

LinkedIn is now in the gaming business. Starting today, users on the LinkedIn mobile app or on desktop can play one of three different games - Pinpoint, Queens, and Crossclimb. You'll be able to play each game once per day, and after your daily session, you'll get access to all kinds of metrics including your high score and daily streak, different leaderboards, and who in your networks has also played. The games are available here under the LinkedIn News and My Network section on desktop or the My Network tab on mobile.

Here's a brief rundown of the three games.

Hundreds of games inspired by Wordle, the popular web-based word puzzle, are at risk of being deleted due to copyright takedowns issued by The New York Times. As reported by 404 Media, The New York Times - which purchased Wordle back in 2022 - has filed several DMCA notices over Wordle clones created by GitHub coders, citing its ownership over the Wordle name and copyrighted gameplay including 5x6 tile layout and gray, yellow, and green color scheme.

Two takedown requests were issued in January against unofficial Korean and Bosnian-language versions of the game. Additional requests were filed this week against Wirdle - a variant created by dialect group I Hear Dee in 2022 to promote the Shaetlan language - and Reactle, an open-source Wordle clone built using React, TypeScript, and Tailwind. It was developed prior to the Times' purchase of the game, according to its developer, Chase Wackerfuss.

The battle over newspaper-style puzzle games is intensifying. Hearst - which publishes the likes of Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and the San Francisco Chronicle - has announced that it has acquired Puzzmo, a puzzle gaming platform led by indie developers Zach Gage and Orta Therox. The move puts Hearst directly up against the gaming efforts of The New York Times. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. As a comparison, in 2022 The New York Times acquired Wordle for "an undisclosed price in the low seven figures."

Puzzmo launched in a limited beta form in October and is billed as a reimagining of the classic newspaper games page. It features a number of notable Gage-designed titles like SpellTower, Really Bad Chess, and Typeshift, along with a streamlined daily crossword puzzle. The site also features community features like leaderboards and multiplayer options. "There's great stuff out there," Gage told me in October of the newspaper games space. "But there isn't this holistic place where people can go and build a community around these games."

For more than a decade, designer Zach Gage has been building an impressive library by reimagining classic games. There have been remixes and updates to everything from chess to solitaire to sudoku, along with inventive word games like Knotwords and SpellTower. But now, as these kinds of games have reached a whole new level of popularity thanks in large part to the explosive success of Wordle, Gage and a small team have been crafting something bigger: a platform called Puzzmo that aims to reinvent the classic newspaper games page by bringing it online.

"There's great stuff out there," Gage says of the space. "But there isn't this holistic place where people can go and build a community around these games."

The New York Times will now offer daily hints for Connections, its delightful yet sometimes frustrating daily word game.

In Connections, you're tasked with finding four sets of associations between 16 words. Each "solution" groups four words together, but the groupings can be tough to figure out. (I only got one correct grouping on Monday's puzzle.) If you're stuck, the new Connections Companion offers a difficulty rating (Monday's was 3.5 out of 5, which I strongly disagree with) and hints you can use to get help without spoiling the entire puzzle.

The New York Times' push into gaming continues as the company is widely launching its next big release: Connections. The game, which has been available in beta since June, is now rolling out basically everywhere the Times games are available. That includes the web, the NYT Games app on both iOS and Android, and "soon," it will also be available in the "play" tab of the main Times app alongside Wordle, sudoku, and the crossword puzzle.

Connections is essentially a word-matching game. Here's the official description:

Apple's upcoming iOS 17 update will add daily crossword puzzles to the Apple News app, but only for News Plus subscribers, the company said on its iOS 17 preview website. The addition of crosswords could make News Plus a more enticing subscription offering - right now, the main benefits to News Plus are access to digital versions of publications and audio versions of some articles.

Interestingly, adding crossword puzzles will put the Apple News app in even closer competition with The New York Times. The NYT is famous for its own crossword puzzles, which you can access in both the main NYT app and NYT Games app, and similar to what's coming for Apple News, the full NYT crossword is only available in those apps with a paid subscription. However, in the NYT's apps, you can play other games like the mini crossword and Wordle for free.

In March, The New York Times made a small but important change to its crosswords app: it dropped the "Crosswords" part of the name in favor of "Games." It's a small but important shift that acknowledges how the app has grown from a place to play the crossword into a hub for many of the NYT's growing library of games.

In addition to the daily crossword, the app now lets you access mini crosswords ("the Mini"), Wordle, a word-spelling game called Spelling Bee, and, as part of some recent updates, sudoku and a visual puzzle game called Tiles. On Tuesday, people who subscribe to the NYT's Games or All-Access subscriptions will start to get an extra perk: the NYT is rolling out access to the previous two weeks of Spelling Bee puzzles so that subscribers have an archive to chip away at.

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Depending on who you ask, the biggest video game last year wasn't the award-winning Elden Ring: it was actually Wordle. The word game continued to take the world by storm in 2022, beating out Queen Elizabeth and the election results in search volume. It was purchased by The New York Times in January 2022, and though its user growth has plateaued, it still has more daily active users than other newspaper offerings like the crossword puzzle or sudoku.

"When we bought Wordle, our main mission was don't break anything. Just let it keep going," said Zoe Bell, executive producer at The New York Times, in an interview. "Then over time, we shifted into this mindset of anything we do has to provide player value. So we're not going to be trying to squeeze players."

Quordle, the word-solving game that emerged at the height of Wordle's popularity, has been acquired by Merriam-Webster, as first reported by TechCrunch. The game now lives directly on Merriam-Webster's website, rather than on its own.

"I'm delighted to announce that Quordle was acquired by @MerriamWebster," a post on Quorlde's Twitter account reads. "I can't think of a better home for this game. Lots of news features and fun to come, so stay tuned!"