#DIGITAL PUZZLE MAKER DRIVER#

“I like to say: ‘Come for the news, stay for games,’” Knight said.”Anything that we can do to create that ‘news plus games’ daily habit, right there in the news app, is a really powerful driver of our strategy as a company.” In addition to its dedicated NYT Games app, the Times offers puzzles in its flagship news app. The Times has found that a subscriber who engages with both news and games in any given week is more likely to stay a long-term subscriber than a subscriber who uses any other product (or combination of products among news, games, Wirecutter, The Athletic, or Cooking). July 11, 2023That kind of success is hugely important to The New York Times, which is all about the bundle nowadays. (The Times declined to give specific user numbers.)

(Connections joins crossword puzzles, Spelling Bee, Sudoku, and Wordle, among others.) Connections is now the Times’ second-most played game (after Wordle) and the most successful launch of any game developed in-house since the Times introduced the Mini Crossword in 2014. The 16-word puzzle opened in beta on June 12 and, on Friday, made its debut on the The New York Times Games app and the “Play” tab of The New York Times app. There’s this awesome, almost two-person game going on between the constructor and the solver they’re trying to trick you and you’re trying to outwit them.”Ĭonnections, the newest game from NYT Games, checks all of the above. “As a player, you’re faced every day with a real puzzle by a real person. “We have a process for rigorously constructing and editing and testing this content before we put it out,” Knight said. Knight isn’t ruling out using AI to construct puzzles in the future but, for now, he sees the human-crafted element in NYT Games as “a differentiator” for the Times going forward.

A human editor should be behind every day’s puzzle. JanuThe game should be “easy to learn, hard to master.” The games on offer range in difficulty from the relatively straightforward Wordle ( acquired by the Times in 2022) to a themeless Saturday crossword puzzle.

Digital puzzle maker