The New York Times’ games team is trying something new: it’s about to start testing a Scrabble-like game it calls Crossplay, but instead of folding the game into the main NYT Games app, Crossplay will be a standalone app. The game is soft launching in New Zealand on iOS on Tuesday.
I was recently shown a demo of the game by Jonathan Knight, head of games at the New York Times, and I think it will look familiar to any fans of Scrabble or Words With Friends. The game takes place between two players. Each turn, your goal is to build a word out of the up to seven letter tiles on your tray and the letters already on the board. Every letter has a different point value, and you can boost your score by taking advantage of bonus tiles on the board that multiply your letter or word scores.
(The New York Times did not provide screenshots I could publish; Knight says that a screenshot of the game right now doesn’t represent where it will be when it launches more widely.)
“We’re really presenting a very pure, classic, elevated version of the game”
The NYT has a few of its own tweaks to differentiate Crossplay from similar games, including different positions for bonus tiles and a different letter distribution, Knight says. The end of the game has a clever twist, too: after all of the letter tiles have been drawn from the virtual bag, each player gets just one additional turn instead of having to clear their tray of tiles to end the game.
Knight argues that Crossplay is its own app because it’s an experience that would be hard to fit in another app. “We’re very specifically wanting to reach all new audiences with this game,” particularly people that love to compete and love word games, he says.
Crossplay requires a free NYT account to play, and your friends from the main NYT Games app will carry over, Knight says. “Certain aspects” of the game will be exclusive to paid subscribers, such as a feature that will help you review your matches. But he says Crossplay won’t have many of the things that can make other free mobile games frustrating.
“In a world where mobile games have become little mini casinos and it’s often hard to find the game itself behind all of the treasure chests and friction and aggressive monetization tactics and coins and all of that, we’re really presenting a very pure, classic, elevated version of the game that you can just get in and enjoy without all that business,” Knight says.
The NYT’s acquisition of Wordle arguably kicked off the ongoing arms race for daily puzzle games, with places like Hearst, LinkedIn, Netflix, and Zynga putting their own stamps on the genre. Overall, the NYT’s games business is growing, according to Knight, including “tremendous downloads” and growing app use and subscriptions.
NYT puzzles were played 11.1 billion times in 2024, according to statistics shared with The Verge by NYT spokesperson Jordan Cohen. Wordle was played 5.3 billion times, “3.3 billion successful Connections were made,” and Strands, the NYT’s word search game, was played 1.3 billion times.
The NYT games team is still developing new puzzles for the main games app, such as Pips, a logic game, that it started beta testing in Canada in April.
