The new york times tiles how to#

It’s a high-concept, artfully designed take on the classic tile game Mahjong solitaire. The Times debuted Tiles, its first nonword game, in June 2019. If you link vertices correctly, the triangle they form will be filled in a specific color.

The number on a dot indicates how many connections it has to other dots.

“At its core, a vertex puzzle is a drawing game with a logic component,” according to an article on the Times website. The catch, though, is that letters on the same side of the “box” can’t be used consecutively. The final letter of one becomes the first letter of the next. Launched in 2019, Letter Boxed, like Spelling Bee, relies more on vocabulary than knowledge of trivia: Three letters are featured on each side of a square and players must connect the letters to make words that are at least three letters long. If you’ve been too intimidated to try your hand at a Times crossword, a Mini is definitely a good place to start. (Occasionally larger “midi” puzzles with 11-by-11 layouts pop up, too.)Įven within that limited space, Fagliano has devised something of a formula, as he told the Poynter Institute for Media Studies: “Six or seven clues that are pretty easy, two that are trivia and two that are a bit more cryptic.” The Mini is an amuse-bouche of a crossword, with a simple five-by-five grid Sunday through Friday and a seven-by-seven layout on Saturday. Since 2014, the Times has offered an easier, smaller puzzle, designed by cruciverbalist Joel Fagliano, now digital puzzle editor at the Times. Sometimes you don’t have the time, energy or gray matter to work on a full-blown New York Times crossword puzzle. New York Times/Screenshot by Dan Avery/CNET The NYT Mini crossword offers a five-by-five grid Sunday through Friday and a seven-by-seven layout on Saturday. Outside of the daily crossword puzzle, Spelling Bee has the most devout following, with a daily column by Isaac Aronow and more than 600 comments a day on average. Our games act as a kind of social outlet for like-minded puzzle lovers.” Spelling Bee There are local Wordplay groups that meet up in real life to get to know each other. “Wordplay commenters have helped and supported each other when personal problems arise. “I can’t think of any other newspaper games section that draws such a devoted and enthusiastic audience,” she said.

“What comes to mind when I think about our solvers is ‘community,’ in the best meaning of the word,” Wordplay columnist Deb Amlen told CNET.

Spelling Bee enthusiast Nancy Pfeffer became so enamored with the game’s online “family” that she embarked on a 5,000-mile cross-country road trip last summer to meet some of her fellow players in person. It’s more than just the engaging puzzles, though: The section has cultivated a massive community that reads the daily Wordplay and Spelling Bee columns and swaps clues, opinions and deeply personal stories. In December, the NYT Games app hit 1 million subscribers. In 2021 alone, subscribers played New York Times online games more than 500 million times. It’s been joined by the Mini puzzle, the word-finding games Spelling Bee and Letter Boxed and the visual-based challenges Tiles and vertex. The New York Times first launched a crossword puzzle app in the Apple store in 2009, and on Google Play in 2016.

The new york times tiles how to#

Here’s everything you need to know about the other games in the New York Times Game family.įor more, find out how to start playing Wordle, tips on how to guess the daily word and a dozen Wordle alternatives.