NYT Games: Wordle & Crossword
Word, Number and Logic Puzzles
Ratings
Age
13+
Category
Games
Languages
English
Mon Aug 31 2026
This version contains bonus puzzles. Try twists on our games, including Wordle in 1, Connections 3x3, Colorful Strands and more. New puzzles drop every Wednesday.
Have feedback? Email us at nytgames@nytimes.com
NYT Games is the official puzzle app from The New York Times, offering a daily suite of word and logic games that have become a global phenomenon. From the viral hit Wordle to the legendary New York Times Crossword, the app provides challenges for every skill level. Test your vocabulary in Spelling Bee, find thematic links in Connections, or solve the quick and clever Mini Crossword. With personal stat tracking and a massive archive of past puzzles, NYT Games is the ultimate destination for anyone looking to sharpen their mind and join a global community of solvers.
Dinsun Expert Review
Our Expert Score
The NYT Games app is arguably the most essential daily companion for any puzzle enthusiast. As a long-time solver, I find the integration of Wordle, The Crossword, and Connections into a single, seamless hub to be a masterpiece of user experience. The app manages to maintain the prestige of the New York Times brand while making word games feel modern and accessible. Wordle is the obvious hook, but the 'Mini' Crossword is the unsung hero, providing a perfect bite-sized challenge for a morning commute.
The technical stability of the app is top-notch, with cloud syncing that ensures your streak is never lost between devices. The addition of 'Strands' and 'Spelling Bee' offers a fantastic variety of linguistic challenges that cater to different cognitive strengths. While some might find the subscription cost for the full crossword library steep, the quality of the daily content—vetted by expert editors—is vastly superior to the procedurally generated puzzles found in free alternatives. It is the gold standard of word-play apps.
Features
Access to Wordle and Connections
The world-renowned NYT Daily Crossword
The Mini Crossword for quick play
Spelling Bee and the Sudoku collection
Featured In
Upcoming Events
Tips & Walkthrough
Start with a word that contains many vowels, like 'ADIEU' or 'AUDIO'. This helps eliminate possibilities quickly. Remember that letters can appear more than once in the final word, a common trap for new players.
Gameplays
The app tracks your consecutive days of solving. To maintain your streak in Spelling Bee, try to find at least one 'Pangram'—a word that uses every letter provided in the hive.
Screenshot
Q&A
Wordle and the daily Mini Crossword are free. A Games subscription is required for the full daily crossword, Spelling Bee, and the puzzle archives.
Ratings & Reviews
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Wed Mar 30 2022 goodtutorThe pleasures of the New York Times crossword do not in fact rival the raptures described by Thomas De Quincey, and they are consequently much less dangerous, but they are considerable, nonetheless, and I fear I spend too much time with them. Besides that, the chief of my confessions is that I routinely turn on autocheck if a puzzle is more than a day old. I also use Google freely. I am strict, however, in doing real searches for the information I need. Any result that includes the word “crossword” is off limits. I have become skilled at rephrasing the clue in such a way that I get few of such results. It’s obvious that there are a lot of people Googling the clues verbatim. Of course, I enjoy it when I can complete a puzzle without help, as I usually can on Monday and Tuesday, when the puzzles are easiest, but the real pleasure for me is in cracking the thematic codes that the puzzles’ authors devise, most explicitly on Sunday. Their ingenuity is remarkable. I have tried my hand, with some success, at writing puzzles myself. It is not easy, and the effort has taught me to forgive the Times authors for resorting regularly to arcana like obsolete spellings, transcriptions of vocalizations that are not words, the tiresome obscurities of sports abbreviations, and the infuriating use of punning in the clues. All part of the game, and unavoidable in a big puzzle. So thank you, Mr. Shortz, and your several colleagues, for many hours of happy mental exercise.
NY Times online crossword puzzle app
Mon Oct 30 2017 drmin73For $2 or $3, you get access to the archive of the daily puzzle in addition to all the Monday through Sunday puzzles as they come out. A gold star is available for each new puzzle that you complete on the day of its issue. It’s an addictive feature that has kept me completing the puzzles each day now for the past two months and counting. Other collections of themed puzzles are available for nominal fees. The included archive alone looks to be enough to keep me occupied for several years to come, at least. These are fun puzzles to experiment with, since the technology allows for rapid, easy letter replacement. I frequently go with my gut on difficult and obscure answers, sometimes finding them surprisingly correct, sometimes transforming entire puzzle quadrants from one set of answers to a largely different set. The letter replacement feature makes this app a clear favorite over the old pen and paper technique. I use the app each day and highly recommend it.
Fun and Frustrating!!
Mon Feb 26 2024 AugustkackWell, the nature of crossword puzzles is definitely fun but it is definitely frustrating too! I enjoy this app a lot and my only comments are that there are times when there are errors, or maybe they’re built in traps to make you think harder, however I can’t really be sure about that, only the puzzle creator actually knows. When you know you have the right words in the right spaces and some of the words just don’t compute correctly in a way that simply cannot be reconciled, something is going on. Maybe the puzzle masters have time constraints and are rushed, maybe they think these irreconcilable differences make players think harder, etc - I mean who knows?? But those glitches are definitely in these puzzles and they make the puzzles all the more puzzling-right?!? So, isn’t that the real point?? Ok, so the other word thing is that players beware! Do not ever allow yourself to be pulled off your game page for any reason because everything you’ve been working on or have finished disappears in a nano second it you blink away from your page! You can be working along thinking everything is fine and maybe you look away for a moment or you rub your eyes and the next time you look down you’re on a new page and all your work has escaped into the ether, the black hole where all your concrete synapses for the past hour live have suddenly moved on to a new home never to be seen again - Boom!! And you’re done. . . So, protect your work and don’t let the fluidity of any frequency snatch your puzzle away when you’re almost done, or worst yet when you’ve just finished.
Pipsqueak
Sat Apr 18 2026 CrisdjinPips should be a fun game but the UI/UX is terrible. The pieces are at the bottom of the screen, so when you drag them up to the board it’s very easy to trigger an iPhone’s active app browser function. The game makers don’t have iPhones? They didn’t hear that they got rid of home buttons and now you swipe up from the bottom to switch apps? And why have the pieces so far from the board in the first place? It makes the game harder because of another design flaw: if I’ve placed a piece and then want to rotate it and move it to another spot, I’m cooked. If I don’t need to rotate it, easy, I just drag it over. If I don’t need need to rotate it, first I have to tap it to unplace it. Sometimes that’s annoying but maybe works as a fail safe against accidental tapping. But after unplacing it, I have to tap again to rotate it. Wouldn’t be a problem except that if the pieces rotates in a way that lines up with empty spaces, it automatically places itself back into the board. 99% of the time, that’s not helpful, and it means having to unplace it again (eats up time), drag the piece back down to the holding area (eats up time), rotating there and then dragging it back up to the board (eats up time), and hoping I don’t accidentally trigger my phone’s switch-app function (eats up time). In a game where ranking is based on Olympics-level differences in performance time, this makes the game very frustrating.
DON’T BITE
Fri Mar 22 2024 Henri PascalI used to subscribe to the NYT, I enjoyed playing all of the games they offered. No doubt that the quality of the game app is great. I have a problem with transparency in the sales of the app. I reviewed all the qualifiers which appear in the App Store, I dug deeper into the NYT developer qualifiers as well. They mentioned no amount to download and play the app. In fact they go so far as to state that should they decide to charge for the app they will give notice of any pricing changes in advance. They sure make you feel like you’re getting an app which you can play for free. Having read everything that was up front as well as the purchase agreement I felt that it wasn’t a pay to play app. As soon as I downloaded the app the first screen I got was an invitation to a one week free trial and then a monthly payment for subscription. I don’t have a problem with the app being a payment subscription. This is the NYT and if you’re going to charge me to use the app then say it before the download. I get how some sites lead you along then you see get the money message, normally I would just roll my eyes and say “fool me once” and bailout. This seems like a breach of good faith by a trusted institution. Practices like these as misleading. If you’re selling something for money, then say so upfront. It’s the NYT, I have lost track of what they have become.
A new UI change lessens the experience features-wise.
Thu Feb 08 2024 Tasdiq AhmedThe new UI update follows the modern trend of improving aesthetic but ignoring the end user. Interest in a shiny toy fast wears thin. A revamp of app design is sometimes very welcome (possibly even necessary in the interest of security), and would’ve been in this case if some features weren’t removed. The previous UI (of which the screenshots currently on the App Store show) had two excellent features to keep me engaged with the app well beyond the daily crossword. The first was a random selection of past puzzles I could complete in my spare time, which would renew with a fresh set every week. The second was a row of crosswords I recently worked on but had not yet finished. It does not make sense to me for the new UI to remove these; it would only mean I spend less leisure time on the app. I might not agree with the new looks, and it’s actually meaningless to focus on that, but at least keep all the features! 1/5 for the devs who missed a few things and should try to get them back ASAP. Customization would be nice to have, as for example I don’t play anything other than the crossword and Wordle; but this isn’t my biggest concern here.
Good but has a ways to go
Mon Jul 22 2024 DawgpwndOverall this app is pretty good, and the games within are fun, but there are a handful of annoyances that I really wish they would address, mostly boiling down to how every game feels like a completely isolated/separate experience. 1️⃣ Why is Vertex still not added? It's really annoying having to do all but 1 game in the app, then switch to the browser just to do Vertex. 2️⃣ Why is the friends list/leaderboard only for the Mini crossword? It would be great to see how my friends did in Wordle, the regular crossword, Connections, Strands, etc without having to hit Share and text everyone individually. 3️⃣ Why does every game have their own settings? For example, I can change Wordle to use Dark Mode and High Contrast mode, but not other games like Connections or Strands. Those settings should be app-wide! 4️⃣ I wish they would add an optional setting to make more games timed. Wordle, Connections, Strands, etc. This would be much more fun to share with my competitive friends than whether or not we had to use a hint or got a guess wrong since that doesn't happen often. 5️⃣Subscribers should be able to access the full archive of Spelling Bee. It doesn't really make sense to only have the past week only.
Good app; wish I could access all games
Sun Feb 13 2022 frenchiepbGood app that is best for crossword (which I understand is the primary purpose of said app). I play the Bee a lot and find small glitches. There’s a slight delay in syncing across devices. I usually have to close and re open the app for the bee to reset for the new game the next day. Regarding crosswords, functionality works great. My biggest critique is that when clicking the info button, the app will re route to an in-app page of information and will also re route to a browser page outside of the app. When I go switch back to the app, sometimes for some reason I can’t get back to the game because the game app isn’t built for browsing the nyt app. Lastly, I wish the crossword app would contain all the games instead of just the crossword and the Bee. I have a separate game account from my digital subscription so I have to log out of the main nyt app app when I want to access other games. The games are buried in the main digital app and it’s cumbersome to find. It would be easier if they were accessible separately.
Some Youtube Videos found!
Doug plays today's NYT Wordle Puzzle Game for 8/30/2025 - YouTube
Doug plays today's NYT Wordle Puzzle Game for 8/29/2025 - YouTube
Doug plays today's NYT Wordle Puzzle Game for 8/26/2025 - YouTube
Doug plays today's NYT Wordle Puzzle Game for 8/28/2025 - YouTube
Doug plays today's NYT Wordle Puzzle Game for 8/24/2025 - YouTube
Vacation NYT Games Aug 12: Wordle, Connections, Mini, Strands - YouTube
NYT Connections, Pips, Mini Crossword, and Strands | Aug 29, 2025 - YouTube
How Fast Can I Complete the NYtimes Daily Games? (Wordle, Connections) - YouTube
Doug plays today's NYT Wordle Puzzle Game for 2/28/2025 - YouTube
Doug plays today's NYT Wordle Puzzle Game for 6/30/2025 - YouTube
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Today’s Wordle Hints for Aug. 30, 2025Scroll down for hints and conversation about the puzzle for Saturday, Aug. 30, 2025.
The New York Times Thu Oct 23 2025
NYT Connections Answers for Aug. 30, 2025Scroll down for hints and conversation about the puzzle for Saturday, Aug. 30, 2025.
The New York Times Thu Oct 23 2025
NYT Spelling Bee Answers for Aug. 30, 2025Hi, busy bees! Welcome to today's Spelling Bee forum. Enter the comments section to see hints, conversation, helpful tips and creative...
The New York Times Wed Oct 22 2025
Wordle hint today: Clues for August 30 2025 NYT puzzle #1533Some clues, tips, strategies to guess Wordle on August 30, 2025 along with the answer.
USA Today Wed Oct 22 2025
NYT Mini crossword answers, hints for August 30, 2025Answers to each clue for the August 30, 2025 edition of NYT's The Mini crossword puzzle.
Mashable Wed Oct 22 2025
NYT Connections Sports Edition today: Hints and answers for August 29, 2025Connections: Sports Edition is a New York Times word game about finding common sports threads between words. How to solve the puzzle.
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