NYT Games: Word Games & Sudoku Reviews

I started doing the NYT crossword a couple years ago (in my 50’s) and while I initially found it difficult and frustrating, I slowly advanced through the week, just as the experts said. NYTGames makes solving more fun and extremely portable, and has been a lifesaver during Covid when I’ve needed diversions from the ever-present bad news. NYTGames is well designed and fun to use. My only “complaint” is the color coding of results. Yellow means you’re on a streak. Blue means you’ve solved it but not on the day of publication OR you needed help. I wish there was a finer gradation of results. To me, there’s a big difference between solving a Thursday puzzle but on a Friday vs having to have NYTGames “reveal” answers that I couldn’t get on my own. For my own interest, I’d like to look back and see how my solving has progressed over months. When they’re all blue, I can’t tell if I really solved the puzzle on my own or not. I don’t really care if I did it in the alloted 24 hour window. Other than that, it’s a winner.

I bought a subscription for the puzzles in NYTGames , under the impression that the subscription works on the website as well for use on my MacBook. Where did I get that impression? Directly on the sign-up page in NYTGames , where it states that this is possible. There is even a step-by-step guide on the NYT website on how to access your iTunes subscription by linking your account. When I did this, however, I discovered that it does not transfer any information at all to the web. I talked to a NYT customer service rep and was told that this is not possible, and the website just hasn’t been “updated” to remove the false information. So you pay 4 cents more a month for the iTunes subscription to get LESS access across your devices, and when you ask NYT about it, they tell you that it was never possible and claim that it’s Apple’s fault that the instructions it provides on its website are completely false. Needless to say, I will be getting a refund on my subscription and I doubt I will ever give it any more time or money. A real shame, as I love the daily puzzles and think NYTGames has one of the better faces among the many crossword apps available. DO NOT SUBSCRIBE WITHIN NYTGames IF YOU WANT TO USE THIS ON OTHER DEVICES.

Good 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 NYTGames 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, NYTGames will re route to an in-app page of information and will also re route to a browser page outside of NYTGames . When I go switch back to NYTGames , 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.

For $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 NYTGames a clear favorite over the old pen and paper technique. I use NYTGames each day and highly recommend it.

My wife and I love to solve the NYT crossword together each and every weekend night using NYTGames. However, I travel during the week and I wish there was a remote collaboration feature where we can solve together when she is home and I am in my hotel room. I want to be able to see what she is typing (real-time) and be able to also type at the same time. (Note, we usually have a FaceTime call going while we are solving separately now--but the experience is not the same as when we are sitting next to each other).

The current version of NYTGames allows us to work separately, and then it occasionally, but unexpectedly, synchs--with her typing replacing mine and vice-versa. If you cannot support real-time collaboration (I think you can), can you at least add a manual synch control so we can both choose when to merge the other's player's typing--possibly with color-coding so we can see the other's additions/changes?

I’ve been subscribed to the NYT crossword for several years now and NYTGames experience has barely changed. Given the amount of available data, there’s a huge opportunity for interesting player stats but there’s nearly nothing available - no way to track your improvement over time, no way to access any trends, no access to comparative data older than the last week, etc. The biggest issue for me is the homepage: a full row advertising “other games” that is just one other game (spelling bee, which i’m not interested in but can’t dismiss), THREE different links to the same “archives” page (four if you count the one in the menu) but no list of all the puzzles you’ve worked on (so: good luck finding one you’ve not finished if you’ve been picking from the archives and are mysteriously stuck at 99.9 completion percentage- you’ll have to just page back, one month at a time for multiple years), leaderboards that are only applicable for the mini, and of course, plentiful in-app purchase opportunities. Don’t get me wrong, I love the crossword, but NYTGames feels essentially like abandonware.

I am a daily player of NYTGames. I feel like NYTimes did a great job with a simple interface that outcompetes, imho, doing crosswords on paper. I like how the puzzles are released. It is more important to have it work well than to have too many bells and whistles. For this I am grateful. However, as a heavy player, I find myself regularly frustrated by an unfulfilling game-play relative to gaming standards today. I would like to see more accomplishment possibilities. I like rewards, badges, rankings and levels. I enjoy the puzzle talk where I can see explanations and chatter about the puzzles but this is apparently not available when a puzzle ages out to archives. The paid packages are nothing special. I would pay extra for themed puzzles that actually stick to enjoyable themes. I would like the ability to leave and see ratings for puzzles! Someday, maybe even a social aspect to NYTGames could be attempted. I love the puzzles. I wish I was better at them! Thank you NYTimes.

Love NYTGames and my subscription to the online crossword. Am having lots of problems with version 2.14 on the iPad though - it keeps failing to accept input from my Bluetooth keyboard (Anker folio cover) while at the same time all other apps on my iPad keep working fine with it. And then at the same time it won't even bring up the on-screen keyboard when I turn off Bluetooth. Have to restart the program, more than once sometimes, to get it to work again. Have tried deleting and re-installing NYTGames from the store. No joy. Sure wish I had kept a cache of the previous version...

Update: it fails in a similar way on my iPhone - the keyboard just disappears and you have to kill and restart NYTGames to get it to reappear. I don't use any Bluetooth keyboard on my phone so this seems that all of this might be a case of NYTGames just forgetting at times to reactivate the keyboard when it's needed. Annoying bug.

I have a subscription to the crosswords at half price due to subscribing to the digital NYTimes as well. I complete the crosswords solely through NYTGames on my phone. I wish NYTGames would also incorporate the other puzzles the NYTimes provides, like the Spelling Bee, Soduku, Set, acrostics, bonus crosswords, and other puzzles. These can be accessed through the help menu in the crosswords app, but I wish they could have their own apps or be accessed on the main page of the crossword app. If only NYTGames could be set to display the main puzzle page (puzzle homepage) of the NYTimes, it would be very easy to access all the available puzzles through NYTGames . As it is, you need to go to the help menu, click on one of the additional puzzle links, and get to the homepage through the menu bar of the puzzle. It’s a pain, and it doesn’t need to be. Please, NYTimes, provide easy access to the puzzle homepage on the Play page! Alternatively, give NYTGames a new tab just for accessing other puzzles. It would make NYTGames so much better!

Works very well. Syncs with the web app pretty much flawlessly (though I have seen some discrepancies with Spelling Bee). Puzzles are great because, obvi.

Still, a few wishes…
1. The pencil button is hard to hit quickly. I use it a lot. Way way more often than I use anything else on the top bar. Would love if it were the top right icon (in place of settings) so that it would be easier to toggle. And/or behind the MORE button on the keyboard. Or something.
2. Another popular crossword app has what I’d call a “soft cheat”: it will tell you how many squares you have wrong without highlighting them. For really hard puzzles, this can be really helpful without giving away the answers.
3. Spelling Bee is so much fun! I wish we could continue and recall older games.
4. When entering a word on spelling bee, it would be sporting if the completed list was filtered in real-time so that you can quickly see if you’ve already entered a word.
5. A tiny UX niggle. On Spelling Bee, the top left arrow should take you all the way back to NYTGames ’s main page, not the yellow spelling bee intro page. Can’t imagine a reason any user would find this a useful interstitial step. Plus, to go back from that page, you have to use the close button, now in the top _right_. I know, I know. Tiny thing but the rest of the UX/UI is so good... feels overlooked.
6. Print puzzles from within NYTGames !

I love NYTGames and use it all the time. The UI is easy to use and smooth, and being able to browse (and download) past puzzles means I never lack for activities.

The one thing that keeps NYTGames from a five-star review, for me, is that I use a hardware keyboard with my iPad, and there’s a bug that’s persisted in NYTGames for several years now. When you type a repeated letter (for example to solve a clue with the word “book”), the second letter is not entered into the puzzle. The keystroke is just dropped somehow. You have to wait probably a good ½ second before you type the same letter again. This only happens with a hardware keyboard (in my case, the smart folio), not the software one.

It’s a small issue in the scheme of things, but it’s just annoying enough that I can’t give a full five stars—especially since the bug has existed for so long. Hope the dev team will consider digging into this, even though it’s probably not a quick one to solve.

The puzzles are of course great, but twice now my streaks have been interrupted when I completed a puzzle in time, but was not connected to the Internet. Yesterday I finished the Saturday puzzle, was greeted with the gold "Congratulations!" screen, and then moved on. This morning it told me I had a zero day streak, and when I looked at the puzzle, the last three squares were blank!

I was in an area of spotty connectivity when I finished the puzzle, and did not open NYTGames again until this morning. The other time this happened was when I was on an overnight flight and finished while in airplane mode. The only thing I can imagine is that NYTGames is calling home pretty frequently to send data back to NYT.

The fact that iPhone says NYTGames 's cellular data usage is an absurd 1.1GB suggests it may be sending all kinds of other info besides where I am in the puzzle. That is NOT REASONABLE.

NYTGames and the puzzles are awesome, but fair warning about the subscription policy. If you subscribe but don't do all the puzzles that are released during your subscription period, and then unsubscribe or don't renew, then you would think NYTGames would still give you access to all the puzzles from during the period your subscription was active. That just seems fair and logical, since if you subscribed to the physical NYT for only a year or whatever, you could do the puzzles at whatever point you felt like it. However, it doesn't work this way. If you miss the puzzles, you're out of luck once your subscription runs out, even if you paid for a whole year and only did a few puzzles. In other words, the only way to get your entire money's worth is to do an average of one puzzle every single day for the entirety of your subscription period. This may seem fine for some people, but for those of us who want to just do the puzzles at leisure, just whenever we have time for them, a subscription is a terrible way to go.

We love using this with our apple tv. We run NYTGames on my iphone and then airplay it to the apple tv. This gives us a lovely interface where everybody in the family can see all the clues for the crossword (a fantastic improvement over crowding around the same small phone screen). It’s a really a great feature which is literally the reason we got our apple tv.

But lately we’ve been having trouble airplaying NYTGames to our apple tv from my iphone 6s+. When we’ve been doing this, it doesn’t display in the nice fullscreen format, and instead it merely shows the narrow copy of what the phone screen looks like. Sometimes restarting stuff helps, but now we’re having consistent trouble with it (and what better day for family help than a Saturday?).

Any insight would be great. [Love NYTGames ]

I went in with high hopes for a relaxing and challenging game but was quickly and immediately disappointed. the hints to the puzzles were so bad and the answers were even worse. The hints were barely hints at all and trying to find meaning in them was a riddle in and of itself. the answers were sometimes not even one word and it was impossible to tell if it was supposed to be one or two words because THERE WERE NO SPACES. to give you an example of an immensely disappointing one: A five letter word, hint: “Later!” not only does the clue give you no hint what so ever but the answer was “Imoff”. no space. I cant believe this is associated with an actual news paper. this was so disappointing. also just a heads up to whoever makes these but for people that actually text since the editors were obviously born in the 18th century, nbd stands for “no big deal” not “Don't worry about it”, that is abbreviated as dw. Maybe this was just targeted at a different demographic but this miss the mark big time and was amazingly frustrating, I would recommend it to nobody

I play the Crossword a few times a week but mostly use NYTGames for Spelling Bee, which I try to play every day. Overall it’s great, but I’ve noticed an issue where I’ll check answers the following day to find a word (or words) included among them that I know I tried the previous day and wasn’t given points for because it was “Not in word list.” For example, I tried to enter “woody” several times on the April 12, 2021 game but it told me it wasn’t on the list. This was odd because woody means covered in trees, but I just figured the game thought it was a proper pronoun and wouldn’t accept it. Fine. The next day it showed up among the game’s answer list.

I’m guessing either answers are added throughout the day as the editor gets emails from players, or that the editor accidentally adds a space after a word when inputting the answers, or something, but either way, it’s frustrating to encounter at least once a week.

I’ve been a crossword puzzle fan for years. The NYT crossword is legendary; if you can solve it, you’re a pro! I was excited about NYTGames because of its “minis,” quick puzzles you can complete in minutes. You can get a bundle of 30 for $3 to $5. Each time I’d buy a bundle, a window appeared offering the opportunity to get a “subscription,” for $40. So, I thought this would include these mini bundles in the price. But when I purchased the subscription, I realized that I still have to pay for these bundles! WTH?! What a rip-off! It would help if they made it clear that all you’re buying is the puzzle that appears in their paper.😤

UPDATE:
Now that the NYT Crossword Team has responded to my issue, and they’ve pointed me in the direction of hundreds of FREE Mini Puzzles, I am extremely happy with NYTGames! It is SO much fun! I’ve alerted all my friends on FB to the enjoyment NYTGames offers. And since most all of my friends are far more brainy, with much better vocabularies, and they possess quicker mental acuity than I do, I have no doubt they’ll be subscribing to NYTGames.

While it’s important for each of us to exercise our bodies, it’s equally as important to exercise our brains. And crosswords are a great way to do that. I highly recommend NYTGames! (FYI, I use it on my iPhone 7.)

I’ve been a subscriber for years, and love NYTGames and the rest of the games available on the NYT website. But occasionally I have problems with my NYT login. Today I was having trouble trying to log in to the website to play acrostics and cryptic crosswords. After more than 35 minutes chatting with a customer rep, the only solution I was given was to uninstall NYTGames and play only online on the browser. I was surprised and disappointed, but was assured this was the only option. I should have remembered the great sitcom The IT Crowd, with its “Hello, I.T., have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?” mantra, and so should have the support person. I eventually logged out of NYTGames , logged back in, and all my problems were suddenly solved. Sigh. So one star is taken off for those website-app log in and communication issues.

I start every morning with tea and the NYT crossword — delivered seamlessly to my phone. It wakes my brain up to solve these witty and sometimes challenging clues. With it comes an archive of past puzzles, many of which have made waiting in lines, or for the oil change (thanks but no thanks to your TV tuned to Fox) or even being put on hold by a robot actually fun. It gives you stats about your solve time and let’s you compete against friends who use it (though I don’t know anyone personally who does). There is also the commentary, which I try not to read until after I’ve completed the puzzle because it does have spoilers, but is immensely enjoyable to read. In short, before I plunge into a day filled with scary news, deadlines and political rancor I spend some times with the Times puzzle. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This has been a daily part of my life for many years and in almost every way is an excellent adaptation of the print version. My wife and I have completed over 2500 puzzles using NYTGames . Its ability to track streaks and keep timing stats is sure to disappoint people who care about those features but aren’t willing to work around the poor implementation of NYTGames ’s ability to work across multiple devices and platforms. It can also be awkward when print versions of the puzzle have a gimmick that can’t be easily executed using NYTGames ’s available features. Both the handling of puzzles when shared on multiple devices and poorly executed adaptation of gimmicky print puzzles have caused NYTGames to improperly end long streaks. A real buzzkill but not a show-stopper for an otherwise addictive and well done app.

I have been using NYTGames and doing the puzzles nearly every day since May 2017. It works great most of the time, but i have some complaints:

1. TWICE now I’ve encountered a glitch where I finish the puzzle and get the completion notification, but the timer continues running. This marks the puzzle as “incomplete” and ends my 500-day streak, putting me back at square one. Why even bother keeping up a streak if it can be yanked away from you at any moment?!?
Is my perfect puzzle streak kind of a silly thing to be upset over? Maybe. Is this setback still absolutely, violently rage-inducing? YES.
I KNOW it’s just a game though. I am a grown adult woman with a sane mind. I am ok. I am ok. I am ok. No, no, I am fine...

2. The friend/leaderboard feature is sooo lame. It only applies to the minis and doesn’t allow you to share your stats for the full size puzzles!!! Lame lame lame.

3. NYTGames doesn’t allow you to access the other types of games and puzzles that you can find on the nyt website. I would love to be able to play spelling bee or do the acrostic from NYTGames !

All that said, NYTGames has changed my life. Doing the puzzle every day brings me a peace and satisfaction that I can’t get anywhere else, and I plan to continue paying for it until my dying breath.