If you haven’t been personally victimized by a difficult game of Strands, you haven’t been playing the New York Times games long enough. The long-standing editorial authority has long been a pioneer for games to go with your morning coffee, launching The Crossword all the way back in 1942. But while The Crossword has remained timeless for decades (and doesn’t look a day over 80), a new set of games moved onto the block and took the world by storm a few years ago.

In 2014, NYT launched The Mini Crossword and followed it with Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed, and Tiles. But, the real FOMO kicked in when it acquired Wordle in 2022 — the popular but simple game spurred the creation of personal group chats, Slack channels, and Teams message strings dedicated entirely to sharing your daily track record. From there, Strands and Connections found a home on every Wordle-lover’s morning calendar.

But I’ve mentioned a lot of games now — so here’s a wrap up of all the best free NYT games and what you might like about each one.

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1

Wordle

The King of NYT

Wordle is the game that took NYT Games to the next level. It grew a cult-following back in 2022, and you’ll often see people posting their results / scores in the form of green, yellow, and grey block emojis on social media. No, they didn’t take the time to create that tetris diagram — after you complete the game, it generates one for you that you can copy, paste, and share anywhere you want.

So how do you play Wordle? The game is in the name — you’re given six attempts to guess a specific five-letter word. As you submit guesses, the color of the tiles will change to show you how close your guess was to the winning word.

• Green means the highlighted letter is in the word and in the right spot.
• Yellow means the highlighted letter is in the word but in the incorrect spot.
• Grey means that the letter is not in the word in any spot.

To help you keep track, the keyboard at the bottom will also have the letters entered so far highlighted in the same color as they are above, so you know what you’re working with.

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2

Strands

For all you Boggle-lovers

In Strands, you find hidden words and figure out the daily theme. There is a group of what looks like random letters, but it’s very much like the word search you used to play with a highlighter when you were little — except this time, the letters can snake around and go every which direction, as long as they’re “connected” side by side, up and down, or corner to corner.

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As you find words, theme words will stay highlighted in blue. You can drag or tap letters to create words. If you tap to create words, double-tap the last letter to submit and see if it fits.

But wait, there’s more — the “spangram.” It’s the word that describes the puzzle’s theme that day, and it may be one or more words. Don’t worry about spaces.

3

Connections

Pattern-seeking frenzy

Connections is a fun one — you group words together that share a common “thread” between them. You need to create groups of four from a list of 16 words. However, the catch here is that you only have four mistakes to make, so it’s all about strategy.

Oftentimes, there will be words that look like they should go together for a very obvious reason — like “Eve,” “Apple,” and “Snake” above. This is meant to throw you off, and NYT does an excellent job of it; just check out the categories above and tell me if you would’ve figured out the last Connection.

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4

The Mini

Keeping it old school

The Mini Crossword is exactly what you think it is: a mini crossword puzzle. The name of this game, though, is speed. I have friends who solve these in just over a minute, so their brains must be wired for this level of quick-thinking. The Mini gives you your time at the very end, too, to share with your friends (and brag a bit, of course).

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5

Spelling Bee

Relive 5th grade glory

Spelling Bee is a fun little game that gives you only seven letters to see how many words you can make with them. They’re fashioned in honeycomb-style blocks for you to tap, and it’s up to you to sound off the words you see. Note that you can repeat letters and they don’t have to be touching or in any particular order.

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6

Letter Boxed

If you want to go insane

20th Century TV / Pocket-lint

The words on the square go round and round…. I guess? No, Letter Boxed is not a circle — it’s quite literally a box. Anyways, you can’t use any letters next to each other when playing. Instead, you have to connect the words across a ways and create a messy spiderweb of 6 different words. The catch is that the last letter of the word you made will be the start of the next word, so you may have to start over a few times.